Why (Allegedly) Defamatory Content On WordPress.com Doesn’t Come Down Without A Court Order | Techdirt: "The threat to legitimate speech posed by the notice and takedown process is behind our policy for dealing with defamation complaints. We do not remove user content based only on an allegation of defamation.
We require a court order or judgment on the content at issue before taking action.
The third example above illustrates why we do not honor takedown demands that aren't accompanied by a court order. If we chose not to wait for a court order, but instead eliminated any potential liability by immediately disabling the site, we would have taken an important, and truthful, voice offline.
Our policy is the right one for us, but it can also be costly. We are often sued in defamation cases around the world based on our users' content. At any given time, we have upwards of twenty defamation cases pending against us around the globe.
This is an inevitable side effect of our policies, and we try to be judicious about our involvement in the cases that we do see. Some cases result in a quick and straightforward judgment, but others require more fact-finding and we often face a choice about what our level of involvement should be.
Ideally, we want to spend our resources fighting cases that matter–either because there is a serious risk to the freedom of speech of users who want their content to remain online, or because there is a serious risk to the company or our people. We recognize that we have some power as a host to not only demand a court order before removing content, but also that we can play a part in ensuring a more fair adjudication of some disputes if we are actively involved in a case. We view this as an important role, both for our users and for the values of free speech, especially in cases where important speech issues are at stake and/or there is a very clear differential in power between the complaining party and our user" 'via Blog this'
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