Techdirt reports on School Vs Blog
By Ria Sharma

Singapore-based Global Indian Foundation manages 22 international schools in 8 countries.  In Sept, 2010, the Global School of Silicon Valley will start operations in US as well.  Their schools aim to nurture global citizens with an international perspective that builds entrepreneurial skills from the very beginning. Its legal action against a blog is now being reported in USA.

On Jan 14, 2010, Techgoss had exclusively published details of how the Global Indian Foundation (GIF) had taken legal action against a Singapore based blog.  We thought the story would be of interest to our Indian readers as the school says its Global School Board of Patrons include a number of high profile Indians in the local IT-ITES sectors.

On April 14, 2010, Techgoss had linked to a Mumbai Mirror article which reported on the arrest of the Ex-Principal of the school who has now been granted bail. But the Singapore based blog totally denied key elements of the Mumbai Mirror report. And Mumbai Mirror has not done any follow up story explaining all the mistakes in its article as pointed out by the Singapore based blog.

On July 19, 2010, Techgoss has reported on how one of Singapore most powerful newspapers TODAY had picked up the story and published the following

 “
In its claim, filed in February last year, GIF said that a posting by a user known as "Parents Caucus" had painted GIIS unfavourably and accused the school of not responding to parents' comments and queries.

Another post touched on the transparency of the schools' examination results - which GIF took to mean that its school was "untrustworthy", "devious" and that the exam results had been misrepresented, it said in the civil suit.

GIF also took issue with comments about the school's charity status.

The plaintiffs are thus claiming for libel and aggravated damages to be assessed, and damages for loss of enrolment fees and/or profits. They want an injunction against the defendant from publishing such posts or comments in the future.

In his defence, which has been submitted in court and will be heard this week, Mr Narayanan denied making any defamatory posts or comments against both plaintiffs.

He argued that, in any case, the posts about GIF were justified because they were true.

Mr Narayanan alleged that GIF was being "stealthy" for suppressing a set of exam results for 2007-2008, and disclosing other results favourable to GIF.

He also said that the blog's rules and commenting policy made it clear that comments were the responsibility of the readers who post them and that the blog does not moderate reader comments.
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And now one of the most powerful blogs in America, Techdirt, has picked up the story and linked to the Techgoss article as well.  The highly regarded Techdirt has 850,000+ RSS subscribers, 35,000+ posts, 250,000+ comments and a consistent Technorati 100 rating. Both Business Week and Forbes have awarded Techdirt with Best of the Web thought leader awards. Techdirt has also won high praise from Wired and Wall Street Journal.  The Techdirt report reads in part

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Indian School In Singapore Sues Parent Because Others Commented On His Blog

I'm very happy that the US has very broad safe harbors for liability in the form of Section 230, though I still don't think such a law should be necessary. It should be common sense that you don't blame a third party for actions of someone else. And yet, even with Section 230 safe harbors, third parties get sued all the time in the US. And, it's even worse in other countries where there are no such protections, and some judges will put liability on a third party, creating horrible chilling effects. Over in Singapore, there's a lawsuit that could be worth following when it comes to the proper application of liability on blog comments. Reader Veri alerts us to the news that a school based in Singapore (though it runs schools around the globe) the Global Indian Foundation (GIF), sued a parent who keeps a blog about the school, not for anything that parent wrote, but what some others wrote in the comments, claiming that the comments are defamatory.

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It would be interesting to see what all evidence is presented in court and how the Honorable Judge rules in this case.