The California lawsuit claiming that Twitch‘s female streamers were “extremely exacerbating” a man’s sexual compulsions has received an official response from Twitch‘s legal team. To start, Twitch has asked the courts for the lawsuit to be dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP laws, which protect people and businesses from spurious lawsuits. But Twitch also adds that its Terms of Service protects it from responsibility for user-created content.
SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuits against public participation.” They’re lawsuits often used to silence or intimidate by creating expensive, drawn-out legal proceedings that are often baseless but still have to go through the motions. Anti-SLAPP laws are designed to stop these types of lawsuits before they get off the ground. And Twitch believes this lawsuit fits those qualifications. If found to be within the scope of California’s anti-SLAPP laws, the case would be dismissed.
More specifically, Twitch cites California Code of Civil Procedure 425.16, which protects parties from lawsuits designed to “chill the valid exercise of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and petition for the redress of grievances.” As such, Twitch moves for “an order striking with prejudice” against the complaint brought against the company. Prejudice implying that the lawsuit against Twitch could never be brought to court again.
Twitch then goes on to explain why this case meets anti-SLAPP requirements in two ways. First, Twitch cites the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230(c), which are federal guidelines that protect providers of online services from the content others publish on their service. And second, they state rather simply that the lawsuit doesn’t actually make a case that California law has been broken.
The last thing that Twitch references is its own Terms of Service. According to Twitch’s ToS, it “takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any User Content” regardless of whether it’s “defamation, slander, libel, omissions, falsehoods, obscenity, pornography, or profanity.” This is effectively the same idea conveyed by the Communications Decency Act, only it ensures that Twitch users agree to it by using the site.
It’s unclear where the lawsuit will go from here. A court date for the lawsuit has yet to be set, though Judge Thang N. Barrett has been assigned. It’s possible that the lawsuit will be dismissed due to anti-SLAPP laws. It’s also possible that the case will continue, as many of the plaintiff’s cases have done in the past. A timeline for proceedings at this point would be difficult to estimate, but this is unlikely to be the last anyone hear’s of this lawsuit against Twitch.
Source: SCRIBD
![\"IT電腦補習](\"http://itteacheritfreelance.hk/test/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo2-2.png\"){kind=logo}
www.itsec.hk
www.itsec.vip
www.itseceu.uk
Leave a Reply