[Rusty075]

Originally Posted by Joe

If someone is offending you with WORDS, walk away, walk out of ear shot. People have as much of a right to offend others, and others do to walk away. (or ask them to stop doing it.)

That's actually the whole reason why this isn't a Free Speech issue, and why the airline was perfectly within it's rights to do what they did.

The other people on the plane couldn't walk away. (well, they could, but that first step's a big one) And the airline did ask her to stop doing it, and she refused.

If it were a public place, then yes, it would be protected political speech. But airplanes aren't public places, they're private property. If someone came into your home, or business, and starting doing something that offended you or your customers, and they refused to stop when asked, what would you do? You'd boot them to curb. And it'd be perfectly legal, just like this is.

It's actually an important civil liberty to be able to control what happens on your property. I'd be more worried if the government started telling me that I had to allow someone to come onto my property and offend me without recourse.



To get back to the website issue......

For a review site the possibility of being sued for a negative review is non-existent. A product review is a journalistic endeavor, even if done by an amateur, and as such is protected by freedom of the press. In order to sue successfully the manufacturer would have to prove libel. Libel requires not just printing something negative, but that the negative was both false and written with "actual malice" , ie either knowledge that it was false, or a disregard for whether it was true or false.

The simplist defense against libel is the truth, and so long as the opinions expressed in the review have some form of evidentiary backup - test results, photographs, etc - then there's no libel. Of course that doesn't protect all the sites who write reviews without test results.


I could see the potential for forum postings being libelous, especially with the evidence of manufacturers using employees as trolls in forums to go out and trash other companies products. (Silenx anyone?) If a website knew that was going on and didn't try to stop it, then they could be legally accused of supporting it. There's a simple prevention for this though too, a single legalese line somewhere on the site that says something to the effect of, "Comments in forums are property of their posters." is protection enough. Most forums tuck that in with their blanket copyright notice somewhere.