Section 230 Protects Public Records Portal, Says Judge While Tossing Bogus ID Theft Lawsuit
from the government-guys-ask-government-guys-to-protect-government-guys dept
Section 230: not just for those irascible tech giants politicians keep grandstanding about. We all may have a love/hate/really hate relationship with various social media services, but Section 230 also protects the little guys. So, while it might be momentarily satisfying to cheer on the latest comeuppance attempt by political opportunists, remember it’s going to be the little guys who get hurt the most.
That’s just one of several lessons that can be learned from this legal victory obtained by OPRAmachine, an online portal for sending Open Public Records Acts (the OPRA in the machine) requests to New Jersey government agencies.
A user of OPRAmachine requested records from the city of North Wildwood. Those records were delivered by the city’s clerk, who failed to redact city employees’ social security numbers from the document before it was sent to the requester and automatically uploaded to OPRAmachine. Once notified of this redaction failure, OPRAmachine took down the documents, redacted them, and once again made them available to the public.
For this automated upload and speedy response to a city oversight, OPRAmachine was sued. You’ll never guess who was the most offended (in the legal sense of the word, I guess) by this city slip-up.
The legal action came after North Wildwood City Clerk W. Scott Jett released the social security numbers and other personal identifiers of police officers in an unredacted OPRA request they fulfilled.
Among those named in the lawsuit was Gavin Rozzi, the creator of OPRAmachine. His website acts as a third-party platform to file public records requests. In turn, the results of the OPRA request are publicly available.
The three police officers sued the city and OPRAmachine under the Identity Theft Protection Act as part of a class action lawsuit.
That’s right. Three cops decided to sue a third party content host because the city failed to properly redact their social security numbers. If any violation of the law actually took place, it was committed by the city of North Wildwood. But cops won’t often bite the hand that (indirectly) feeds them. Instead, they thought they could sue OPRAmachine into paying them for an error made by one of their fellow city employees.
At first, they succeeded. But OPRAmachine filed a motion for reconsideration of the earlier order granting the three officers (Andrew Moon, Tyler Huck, Ryan Ladd) a win on some of the counts. The second pass has resulted in a resounding defeat for the three officers who couldn’t sue straight.
On May 17th, 2023, Superior Court Judge Ralph A. Paolone granted OPRAmachine and Rozzi’s motion for reconsideration, dismissing all remaining counts against the company that operates OPRAmachine and affirming the platform’s immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from liability related to third-party content which includes public records uploaded to the website.
Simple enough and certainly the correct decision. But that’s the dry stuff which, while certainly important, isn’t nearly as entertaining as OPRAmachine founder Gavin Rozzi verbally smacking the cops and their litigation team around for engaging in such obviously stupid litigation.
Rozzi also highlighted the spurious nature of the plaintiffs’ claims, saying, “It is intriguing that despite the City of North Wildwood offering free identity theft monitoring to the plaintiffs, they chose not to take advantage of it. Now, they claim they are at risk. These inconsistencies raise doubts about the credibility of their claims and ability to serve as class representatives.”
That’s not even the best part. This is:
“This case should have never been brought as it flew in the face of federal law. The unprofessional behavior exhibited by Barry and Lezama-Simonson throughout this case is deeply disappointing. They cited an overturned district court case in their briefs in a cavalier attempt to mislead the court and repeatedly missed deadlines, displaying a lack of diligence and disregard for legal procedure. It was clear that they were both out of their depths here. This outcome totally disproves the malicious lies about myself and OPRAmachine contained in their complaint.”
This is pretty good, too:
Even worse, Frank Corrado, a partner in Barry’s firm previously represented the Internet Archive and argued the exact opposite legal position in federal court, so this firm clearly should have known better before pursuing this dead-end theory of liability against OPRAmachine.
A resounding loss, albeit one that required OPRAmachine to convince a judge to take a second look at his own decision. But it all turned out for the best, generating more precedent that will help ensure even smaller sites like OPRAmachine aren’t turned into settlement fodder for disingenuous opportunists like these three officers.
Filed Under: new jersey, public records, section 230
Companies: opramachine
