Imagine this scenario. You’ve just been made legally blind by a group of doctors performing lasik eye surgery. You put up a website that mentions the doctors’ names. The doctors get mad and have their lawyer send you a nasty cease-and-desist. You take the site down while you contemplate your options. Then, a few weeks later, you put the website back up with new content and docs.

Do you still have the right to name the doctors on the site?

That was a case heard by the Philadelphia appeals court last week against Pennsylvania resident, Dominic Morgan. Morgan had kept the names of the doctors off his website until his medical malpractice case ended. Since he didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement, he then added the names of the doctors to his website, http://www.lasiksucks4u.com.

Not long after, he got a nastygram claiming he was libeling the doctors.

The case went to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia, where a judge ruled that he did, in fact, waive his right to further criticize the doctors by taking down the site. That’s when Public Citizen stepped in to help.

In June 2006, they filed an appeal in the Pennsylvania Superior Court in Philadelphia to reverse the decision, and last week, the judge overturned the lower court’s decision.

Note - this case isn’t about whether or not he libeled his doctors. It’s about whether he waived his rights to criticize the doctors when he took the content down.

If the lower court decision would have stood, it would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech. Large companies often bully the small guys by shooting off nastygrams demanding they take down their content. Initially, many of the little guys do. The question here was - does doing so mean they agree not to discuss the matter in the future? Thankfully, the legal answer is now “no”.

Source: Dave Farber’s Mailing List via TechDirt