Dare I say, negative contributions on the Western Michigan football message board had a negative, not negligible, impact on the Western Michigan head football coach?

Fascinating thread.

"I do retract the 3 emoticons that were posted as a reply to the original comment that in fact did reference a specific individual of whom I in fact have no first hand knowledge of any of said persons personal activities."

"I believe to the best of my ability that this matches the same size type and has been posted in the same manner as the original posts in the "Fire Fleck" thread."

Wow.

That brings me back to a congratulations to Ted, Jeff, and Ryan, who have done a great job of running this board so as to avoid issues like that. I know that sometimes people are offended when posts are deleted, but they usually are quick to delete posts that are potentially slanderous.

That's our job.

We actually take a course called "Ruining Everything 101."

I am curious if you can explain without implicating anyone? Were they posters or people/business/organization who happened to be topics of conversation?

1. The giant pretzel manufacturer
2. The guy in your avatar

Oh wow.

CSNbbs is a clown show.

I'll make a bet that she won't be successful with this law suit if it ever actually goes to trial. However, it may likely get settled out of court. It'll be interesting to watch how it develops.

one of the defendants who goes by "Chipdip2" is a real piece of work, you might know him better by his BA name "Chipdip49". The guy was relentless in defaming CMU's player on every CMU opponents' message boards. Real internet tough guy type.



http://www.bobcatattack.com/messageboard/topic.asp?FromPa...

L.C., it seemed to me that those that retracted their statements on the board were those who were being sued. I could be wrong about this. Retractions, of course, don't remove your liability but they will tend to mitigate the damages that can be collected. The other question I have is whether she is known well enough that she could be considered a public figure and thus allow the defendants to invoke the Times criteria of actual malice. This effectively flips the burden of proof and places it on the plaintiff. It makes the state law basically irrelevant and places the Federal standard, as defined by the Supreme Court in Times V. Sullivan, as the ruling criteria. At one point any one in the news was considered a public figure (sort of a bootstrap logic); however, in recent years the Court has pulled back on this and it is now much harder to get a person categorized as a public figure in this context. Originally you had to be an elected or appointed public official to be considered a public figure, but after being expanded to an almost absurd extent the Court's pullback has left that line somewhat blurred. It's been several years since I've studied this aspect of Mass Communication law, so I stand ready to be updated on this issue. The bottom line is the libel law is a complex issue.

Probably would meet the state definition of actual malice, L.C. The Federal definition, if applicable, would require proof that the defendants had either reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of their statements or that they made "knowingly false" statements.