Section 230 Applies to Publication of Court Documents–Medina v. Microsoft

In 2014, Medina sued Microsoft. Microsoft’s filings made some unredacted disclosures about Medina that were repeated in an unredacted court opinion, and those documents appeared on several websites that publish court documents. In 2020, Medina got the disclosures from the 2014 case sealed. He then sued the court document repository websites (and other defendants) for defamation, false advertising, and more. The trial court anti-SLAPPED that lawsuit. The appeals court affirms.

I’ll concentrate on the Section 230 discussion. The court says Medina has no probability of prevailing against the repository websites due to Section 230:

Medina does not dispute that legal research defendants are interactive computer service providers. The operative complaint further admits “Microsoft and [attorney] are the original publishers of” the 2014 court documents…Accordingly, section 230 bars Medina’s causes of action against legal research defendants

In other words, the repositories were merely republishing third-party court documents, something squarely covered by Section 230.

Medina argued that the repository websites didn’t retract the documents that had become sealed, so that made them responsible for the continued publication of that redacted material. The court says that the 2020 ruling didn’t require publishers to depublish the extant versions of the 2014 documents, so this argument had a faulty premise.

This case brought to mind the Martin v. Hearst case. In that case, the plaintiff got her arrest expunged. She then sued traditional publishers for defamation, claiming that her now-expunged arrest made their previous stories about the arrest false. The court had little difficulty rejecting the defamation claims in that case. (Section 230 wasn’t at issue there because the publishers had written the stories).

I also recall the Google Expunction case in Texas, where a lawyer had a disciplinary proceeding opened against him and then dropped, leading to an expungement of the proceeding. He too sought to suppress references to the proceeding; that too failed.

More generally, these cases reflect efforts to synthetically create a U.S. “right to be forgotten.” Plaintiffs’ efforts to effectively rewrite history don’t go very far in the U.S., while in the E.U., they will be given much more receptivity. I’ll let you decide which system you prefer.

The exact nature of the disclosures about Medina isn’t referenced in this opinion, and it’s not important enough to this post for me to go track it down. However, Medina’s continued efforts to suppress those disclosures comes with a very obvious Streisand Effect risk. The O’Kroley v. Fastcase case is an example. In dismissing the case, the court says sardonically:

In most respects, O’Kroley didn’t accomplish much in suing Google and the other defendants. He didn’t win. He didn’t collect a dime. And the search result about “indecency with a child” remains publicly available. All is not lost, however. Since filing the case, Google users searching for “Colin O’Kroley” no longer see the objectionable search result at the top of the list. Now the top hits all involve this case (there is even a Wikipedia entry on it). So: Even assuming two premises of this lawsuit are true—that there are Internet users other than Colin O’Kroley searching “Colin O’Kroley” and that they look only at the Google previews rather than clicking on and exploring the links—it’s not likely that anyone will ever see the offending listing at the root of this lawsuit. Each age has its own form of self-help.

Case Citation: Medina v. Microsoft Corp., 2024 WL 2745115 (Cal. App. Ct. May 29, 2024)