Craigslist.org can't be held liable for discriminatory ads posted on its site, according to a court ruling released Friday.
A group of Chicago lawyers had sued the online classifieds site over real-estate ads that stated discriminatory preferences such as "no minorities" or "no children." The group, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, argued that such ads are prohibited under the Fair Housing Act and that Craigslist should be held liable for allowing them to be posted on its Web site. Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, likening Craigslist to courier services such as FedEx or UPS, which do not read or screen the messages they deliver. Easterbrook said it would be expensive and problematic for Craigslist to filter messages before they were posted.
The ruling (PDF) is good news for the many Web sites that host public forums, giving them further legal protections against liability claims based on content posted by their users, but is an obvious setback for proponents of fair housing online and off.
The California Supreme Court said on Wednesday it will consider an age discrimination lawsuit filed against Google by a then-54-year-old manager who was fired six months before the company went public in 2004.
In his lawsuit, Brian Reid alleges he was told he was not a "cultural fit" when he was being fired from his job in February 2004. He also claims that his colleagues referred to him as "old man" and "fuddy-duddy."
Google has declined to comment on the matter but says Reid was let go because the in-house graduate degree program department he had been assigned to was eliminated.
In October, a California state appeals court in San Jose threw out a lower court's decision to dismiss the lawsuit. The appeals court said a jury should have been allowed to consider the evidence in the case, including a statistical analysis that found that younger Googlers typically received better performance ratings and higher bonuses. Google then appealed that ruling.
Reid, who joined Google in June 2002 as director of operations and director of engineering, helped to create the first firewall, and worked on the AltaVista Internet search engine and the alt.* hierarchy of newsgroups in Usenet.
The California Supreme Court did not say when it would hear the case but it will likely be before June, which is when its schedule for hearing oral arguments typically ends.
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