Scenario in PRC

Laws and Regulations

The first case suing the ISP
The plaintiffs of this case are two owner representatives of a residential estate named Beautiful Garden. From June 2001, they had read articles about property in a BBS named after their owner organization. They claimed that three articles were libelous and had insulted them. After negotiation with www.sinoi.com, the BBS hosting service provider, those three articles were deleted gradually. However, the two owner representatives were not satisfied and filed the case to the court, suing the www.sinoi.com for being irresponsible of managing and censoring its website, and not providing the information of the articles writers (Fung, 2001).

The defendant countered with regard to the new regulation on administration of internet broadcasting bulletin system issued by the Ministry of Information Industry in 2000. It claimed that regulation only stated that the host needed to bear liability only when it did not delete or care any illegal messages. In fact, the defendant had no time and ability to censor numerous messages posted to the BBS each by each and they had already deleted the three articles after the plaintiffs' notification.

On March 20, 2002, the court ruled that the three articles did infringe the reputation of the plaintiffs but the defendant did not bear any responsibility. It was because the defendant, served as a hosting service provider, should not arbitrarily delete any messages in the BBS. The court also agreed that the defendant had already taken remedial actions, deleted those three libelous articles. The court overruled the plaintiffs' demand to the defendant for revealing the information and identity of the original writers of the articles, because the time when the plaintiffs raised this request was already over the period of keeping personal information by website.

Though the libelous articles remained unknown, the court in this case overruled the plaintiffs' claims against the ISP, which means a lot to the ISP companies in China. The court accepted the view that ISP should not arbitrarily delete any messages in the BBS when they are not sure about whether any specific message might be libelous (Xinhuanet, 2002). However, how to define whether a message is libelous is another question.