The lawyers are still updating their statement (news) that I will post on here once I have it first. Expecting mid-day.

Some background and perspective:

Communications Decency Act (“CDA”) protects online service providers (OSPs) from policing their community. Protects freedom of speech and holds accountable the USER not the OSP.

The EFF Legal Guide for bloggers: CDA, Section 230 Protection

Your readers' comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider. This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it. However, if you selected the third-party information yourself, no court has ruled whether this information would be considered "provided" to you. One court has limited Section 230 immunity to situations in which the originator "furnished it to the provider or user under circumstances in which a reasonable person...would conclude that the information was provided for publication on the Internet...."

Part of the Communication Decency Act of 1996 CDA 230 provides online intermediaries that host speech with protection against a range of laws that might otherwise hold them legally responsible for what their users say and do. CDA 230 protects against all claims under state law as well as all other claims except criminal and some intellectual property-based claims. CDA 230 is the bedrock protection that allows Yahoo to host message boards Craigslist to host classified ads and Facebook and Twitter to host social networking updates among many other online speech activities. Read more.

CDA 230 also offers a legal shield to bloggers who often act as intermediaries by hosting speech on their blogs. Under the law bloggers are not liable for comments left by readers on the blog the work of guest bloggers tips sent via email or information received through RSS feeds. This legal protection holds even if a blogger removes certain posts or even edits content slightly provided the edits don’t impact the messaging.

I went with Salon to break the news, and the AP now has it as well.

Backpage.com files suit against the State of Washington protecting #feespeech & #openweb. Here is the article on Salon.

Perhaps most significantly, the filing points out the potential breadth of the law’s application: It holds even “social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!, and hundreds of others [online service providers], criminally liable for online content, whether they were aware of the content or not.”