Backpage.com and the prostitution law that could take down Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia

Backpage.com and the prostitution law that could take down Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia

By Matt Stroud on June 18, 2012



If you want to pay for sex in the United States — or offer sex services for a fee — and you’d rather not troll derelict city street corners late at night, chances are you’re going to use backpage.com.

About 70 percent of the revenue generated from online sex transactions in the U.S. goes to Backpage.

And with Craigslist no longer offering sex services on any of its 700 sites around the world (Craigslist dropped its "adult classifieds" section in 2010), Backpage’s adult market share has nowhere to go but up.

But there’s a hitch. And that hitch not only threatens to put Backpage out of business. It also threatens to completely change the way websites handle third-party content.

Read on...

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/18/30...tter-wikipedia

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What say you JD?

Under federal law, backpage.com is virtually immune from any lawsuits about posted content. What's going on is that the state of Washington is trying to enforce a state law regarding the offer of sex on line, e.g., on backpage.

Thing is, "content" is immune, so Washington state is having some issues with that alone, plus, when you consider the real fact, more than likely backpage has zero servers actually located physically in Washington state, so proving "nexus" on that basis will be difficult.

Bottom line: you can try to charge the actual poster, but the "publisher [backpage] carrier in this instance, per federal law" has immunity.