Currently, if you post an item to your blog that quotes somebody else’s writing, you’re protected under federal statute if the person you quoted is found to have libeled another party. That could change if the California Supreme Court finds for the plaintiffs in the case of Bartlett v. Rosenthal. Ileana Rosenthal, writing in a Usenet newsgroup, quoted another post. The plaintiffs argue that that quoting the earlier post makes Rosenthal a “developer” of the information “and she therefore becomes the legal equivalent of its creator for the purposes of the lawsuit,” according to a post on the Linux Electrons blog.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a “friend of the court” brief asserting the defendant’s right under Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Section 230 protects Internet service providers from legal actions against ISPs for customers’ online writings. “Similar attempts to eliminate the protections created by Section 230 have almost universally been rejected, until a California Court of Appeals radically reinterpreted the statute to allow lawsuits against non-authors,” according to the post.

“Section 230 protects the ordinary people who use the Internet and email to pass on items of interest written by others, free from the fear of potentially ruinous lawsuits filed by those who don’t like what was said about them,” said ACLU staff attorney Ann Brick. “The vitality of the Internet would quickly dissipate if the posting of content written by others created liability. The impulse to self-censor would be unavoidable.”