Дело Stratton Oakmont против Prodigy: ответственность онлайн-провайдеров за контент пользователей.

1995 decision of the New York Supreme Court

Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., 23 Media L. Rep. 1794 (N. Y. Sup. Ct. 1995), is a 1995 decision of the New York Supreme Court holding that online service providers can be liable for the speech of their users. The ruling caused controversy among early supporters of the Internet, including some lawmakers, leading to the passage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Prodigy, an early online content hosting site, hosted a bulletin board called Money Talk on which anonymous persons could post messages about finance and investing. In October 1994, an unidentified user on Money Talk submitted a post claiming that Stratton Oakmont, a securities investment banking firm based in Long Island, New York, and its president Danny Porush, had committed criminal and fraudulent acts in connection with a stock IPO. Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy as well as the unidentified poster for defamation.

Stratton Oakmont argued that Prodigy should be considered a publisher of the defamatory material, and was therefore liable for the postings under the common law definition of defamation. Prodigy requested a dismissal of the complaint, on the grounds that it could not be held liable for the content of postings created by its third party users. This argument cited the 1991 precedent Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., which had found CompuServe, an online service provider, not liable as a publisher for user generated content. The Stratton court held that Prodigy was liable as the publisher of the content created by its users because it exercised editorial control over the messages on its bulletin boards in three ways: 1) by posting content guidelines for users; 2) by enforcing those guidelines with "Board Leaders"; and 3) by utilizing screening software designed to remove offensive language. while Internet enthusiasts found that expecting website operators to accept liability for the speech of third party users was both untenable and likely to stifle the development of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden (D. Or.) proposed legislation that would resolve the contradictory precedents on liability while enabling websites and platforms to host speech without needing to worry about legal consequences. Wyden's proposal developed into Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996. While the rest of the Communications Decency Act was overturned by the Supreme Court as an unconstitutional speech restriction, Section 230 was severed from the rest of the statute and is still in effect, because it was intended to enable speech rather than restrict it. Section 230 also served to overturn the New York Supreme Court ruling in the Stratton case, as the legislation clarified that website operators and Internet service providers are not to be considered "publishers" of third party content and instead merely provide a platform for their users.