LONDON — One of Europe’s top courts has ruled that an Estonian news organization can be held liable for defamatory comments posted on its website.

The decision signals the first time that the European Court of Human Rights has intervened in a case related to the role that publishers have over user-generated content disseminated through their online news websites.

The decision, which was announced in Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday, has raised concerns for free-speech advocates who fear that newspapers’ ability to publish information may be hampered if they are held responsible for all comments made on their sites.

“Holding organizations liable for user comments hampers freedom of speech,” said Peter Noorlander, chief executive of the Media Legal Defense Initiative, a media rights group in London. “Comment sections are important. They allow for debate on issues of public interest and have become an integral part of online media.”

The case relates to a 2006 article published by Delfi, one of Estonia’s largest news websites, about SLK, a local ferry company. The article led to thousands of angry comments against the company, including many anonymous posts that were both defamatory and threatening toward SLK and its owner.

In response, the ferry operator asked Delfi to remove the harmful comments. While the news organization had used filtering technology to block some of the posts, the remaining comments were taken down six weeks after the initial request. Delfi’s employees did not edit or moderate a majority of the comments.

A local Estonian court initially found that Delfi was responsible for the defamatory comments and fined the company 320 euros, or $360. The news organization, however, appealed the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights, emphasizing that it had the right to publish content under European rules on freedom of expression.

Yet in its legal decision, the European Court of Human Rights said that Delfi’s rights to freedom of expression had not been harmed by the Estonian court’s decision, and that Delfi could be held liable for the user-generated content published on its website.

The judges emphasized that the extreme nature of the comments and the fact that they had been published on Delfi’s professionally managed — and commercially run — website made the company liable for the posts.

“The steps taken by Delfi to remove the offensive comments without delay after their publication had been insufficient,” the European court said in a statement.

While the ruling may have significant implications for Europe’s largest media companies like Axel Springer and Bertelsmann in Germany, the European court emphasized that its decision related only to publishers, and not to social networks and other Internet giants like Facebook and Google, which rely heavily on user-generated content.

Urmo Soonvald, Delfi’s editor in chief, said the news organization continued to develop and improve how it handled user-generated content on its website.

“I believe those who passed the verdict comprehend its historical dimension,” he said in a statement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/bu...urt-rules.html