Notch a victory for sanity and reasoned judgment coming from the US 7th District Court of Appeals. In case 07-1101: Chicago Lawyers' vs. Craigslist the court ruled strongly in favor of the defendant, Craigslist. In the lawsuit, the Chicago Lawyers' are making the argument that Craigslist is at least partially liable for the content of the advertisements placed using their website. Specifically, the case revolves around a classified advertisement in which the statement "NO MINORITIES" appeared, which is in violation of federal Equal Housing Opportunity rules. Craigslist argued - correctly - that they are not the originator of the content so they cannot be held liable under any federal laws for the words used in the classified ad.
In the opinion written by Judge Easterbrook, Easterbrook makes several good points:
Web sites are not common carriers, but screening, though lawful, is hard. Simple filters along the lines of “postings may not contain the words ‘white’ ” can’t work. Statements such as “red brick house with white trim” do not violate any law, and prospective buyers and renters would be worse off if craigslist blocked descriptive statements.Further, the judge points out that it would be completely impractical for a company like Craigslist to hire humans to manually review each ad for potentially illegal speech prior to posting:
An online service could hire a staff to vet the postings, but that would be expensive and may well be futile: if
postings had to be reviewed before being put online, long delay could make the service much less useful, and
if the vetting came only after the material was online the buyers and sellers might already have made their deals.
Every month more than 30 million notices are posted to the craigslist system. Fewer than 30 people, all based in
California, operate the system, which offers classifieds and forums for 450 cities. It would be necessary to increase
that staff (and the expense that users must bear) substantially to conduct the sort of editorial review that the
Lawyers’ Committee demands—and even then errors would be frequent.
And yes, all of this has been covered extensively elsewhere, but something funny occurred to me as I was reading about the case and the ruling. Although I do not know for certain in which city this particular classified advertisement was placed, it seemed that the population trends throughout most of the USA would make such an advertisement fairly counterproductive. For example, assume that by "NO MINORITIES" the apartment owner meant "No people who are not of white European descent". Next, assume the ad was posted in a city like San Francisco, the home of Craigslist. Based on 2006 US Census data, that meant that they would only consider 57% of the city population as eligible to rent their apartment. Can you imagine any sensible business person declaring nearly half of all possible customers were unwelcome because of the color of their skin? I suppose you can, but they'd probably be out of business fairly quickly.
