Indybay refuses to remove article about Amanda Lollar, Bat World Sanctuary

The San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, more commonly known as Indybay, was founded in the year 2000. Along with the international Independent Media Center network, Indybay was a pioneer of open publishing on the internet, creating a space for people to publish their own articles, photos, video, audio, and PDFs online years before corporate websites such as Flickr, Scribd, and YouTube appeared. Perhaps it is not surprising — considering the radical nature of content posted by journalists and activists to Indybay.org — but over the course of these past dozen years, there have been numerous requests to remove content published by Indybay users. The all-volunteer Indybay Collective, however, regularly rejects such requests. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and other public interest and civil rights attorneys have been reliable allies of Indybay when needed to beat back these bogus and sometimes illegal requests to silence speech.

In 2003, in an attempt to stop the spread of leaked internal documents online, election voting machine manufacturer Diebold issued a cease and desist to Indybay’s web service provider at the time, the Online Policy Group (OPG), making copyright claims supposedly based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The Indybay Collective and the OPG refused to delete the content. While the document archive is no longer online at the original location, the Indybay post remains to this day. On OPG’s behalf, the EFF sued Diebold for having violated sections of the DMCA, leading to a sizable payment by Diebold in the case.

More recently in 2011, an Indybay post from a Texas animal rights activist entitled “Amanda Lollar commits animal cruelty at Bat World Sanctuary” led to demands for removal and legal threats. But the ACLU told lawyer Randy Turner that Indybay would not be removing the animal cruelty article:

Indybay will not remove these materials. Under § 230 of the Communications Decency
Act, operators of websites such as Indybay cannot be forced to censor articles and other
information that, like the materials here at issue, originate with a third party, even if those
materials are defamatory or otherwise objectionable….

Moreover, Indybay has a First Amendment right to display factually accurate materials,
including videos and photographs, even if they were acquired unlawfully by a third party.