Thomas Dart, the Illinois sheriff who took on Craigslist, has lost his legal battle with the online classifieds site. But he vows not to give up.
- Cook County Sheriff
- Sheriff Thomas Dart, right, sued Craigslist to get its “erotic services” section closed.
“It wasn’t a publicity stunt,” said Dart of the suit he filed in March to shut down the “erotic services” section of Craigslist, which he said catered to prostitution. “After two and a half years of contacting them with no response, I had no option left but to sue them,” he said,
Earlier this week, a Federal District Court Judge dismissed the suit. Judge John F. Grady ruled that the site couldn’t be held accountable for how people used it, because it is protected by the Communications Decency Act. Wrote the judge: “Intermediaries are not culpable for ‘aiding and abetting’ their customers who misuse their service to commit unlawful acts.”
Craigstlist, in a statement, said, “We welcome the judge’s decision.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s staff attorney Matt Zimmerman went a step further in his analysis. “Meritless cases brought by law enforcement officers, amounting to little more than publicity stunts with little to no chance of success, do little to address the officers’ underlying concerns,” he wrote.
Sheriff Dart, in an interview, said that he was “disappointed” and considering appealing the verdict.
He thinks that the Communications Decency Act is being misapplied by the courts. “I can’t conceive that when this law was drafted and passed that anybody wanted to use it to allow absolutely anything to be placed on the Internet,” he said.
“The site has been hijacked for criminal purposes,” he said. “If we were talking about a Web site that had a section of it where people went to do murder for hires or sell kilos of cocaine, nobody would say that it was just the responsibility of the bad people using the site,” he said.
Over the summer, Craigslist announced it was abandoning the “erotic” category and instituting a new system to manually review the adult ads on its site.
But Dart said that system wasn’t sufficient. “There is no sincere effort being made here. They are trying to do the bare minimum,” he said. “We have yet to respond to one [suspicious] Craigslist ad where it was, in fact a masseuse.”
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