Forum owners to be held responsible for users' posts?

This may be of interest to many of us who run sites. Of course, it's The
Register and we all know that they're not the most reliant of news sources, but
if it's true, let's hope it gets overturned and doesn't start working its way
across countries.  If it's legit and held to be enforceable, every user could
need to be moderated in order to prove that we've used diligence in watching
their posts.

"A Hamburg court has ruled that moderators of online forums may be held
liable for forum content.  A forum participant on the Heise Online website
posted a script intended to disrupt business at Universal Boards, a Munich
company criticized for distributing dialers for premium rate phone numbers and
buying up expired domain names to advertise pornography.  A moderator for Heise
Online took down the script at Universal Boards' request, but Universal sued for
a temporary restraining when Heise Online refused to sign a formal obligation. 
The judge ruled that businesses should "reduce the scope of their business
operations" if they do not have the resources to properly monitor their web
forums.  Heise plans to appeal the ruling."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/21/moderator_liable_for_comments/

I'm glad that I am in the US.

US judges have thrown out similar cases saying that the real time nature of such
sites is hard to moderate and sometimes post slip through.

There was a case about this her ein the states a few months ago. Woman ran a
forum got about 300 post a day. Someone slandered someone and sued the website
owner for not taking down the post. Judge ruled against the plantiff.

Hi,

Yes, I saw it on Donna's security RSS feeds. I can't imagine that a forum would
be able to test all content of referenced websites, and validity of all lines of
code. And besides, most of the forums are international. I can't imagine what a
national judge can decide about it.

CU

Hans

There was a case for us (it's in one of my brothers Law textbooks from uni)
where the website was offshore but targeted Australian's so the owners were
prosecuted (it was some financial site)

"Yes, I saw it on Donna's security RSS feeds. I can't imagine that a forum
would be able to test all content of referenced websites, and validity of all
lines of code. And besides, most of the forums are international. I can't
imagine what a national judge can decide about it."

I agree completely. Some people try to make a name for themselves when
litigating these types of things and others are just plain misinformed about how
things work in the real world.