Last week, we wrote about how Vision Media TV was suing 800notes.com over comments made by users on the way Vision Media TV does business — a business method that has been criticized in the pages of the NY Times among others. Of course, 800notes has a clear Section 230 defense, but Vision Media is trying to get around that. Our post was based on a post by Paul Alan Levy, from Public Citizen, who is helping 800Notes in its defense. He’s also now let us know that Vision Media is upset about his own discussion of the lawsuit and that it has asked the court for an injunction barring Levy from posting documents from the case on his blog or discussing them — despite the fact that the filings he posted were all public.
Vision Media seems to be claiming that just posting these public documents is defamatory, which seems quite odd. Also odd is that Vision Media claims that all this publicity might hurt Hugh Downs most of all. Downs, the former host of 20/20, apparently works with Vision Media and is part of the enticement to companies in trying to get them to pay to be on a Vision Media video program. But, again, if Vision Media has done nothing wrong, then it’s hard to see how a discussion of the lawsuit would harm its own reputation, or that of Downs. Yet, using Downs’ name in support of an attempt to silence a blog post would seem more likely to harm Downs’ reputation than anything that Levy did in his own post.
