The Case of Omania.net (Sablat Al Arab) is Over?
The decision of the Omania.net سبلة العرب case has finally been announced, Said Al Rashdi has been found not guilty of all the charges made against him for the defamation of the four claimants that sued him in November last year.
The court held that Said was not to be held liable for the writings of other members. The question of how they got this principle or why they found him not guilty is something that I do not know. No media coverage was provided for this case, the only publication that seems to acknowledge the existence of Sablat Al Arab is Al Shabeeba newspaper, which followed up the progress of the case with some little pieces every now and then, but again did not write anything yet on the decision of the case that was made yesterday but I could not get my hands on the hard copy of today’s paper. All the information that you read here comes from what I read on random Arabic Omani discussion boards.
The court ordered that compensation is to be awarded to the defamed claimant. The damages varied from RO300 to RO500. (One the claimants, a female school teacher, originally asked for HALF A MILLION. Talk about crazy people.) A known author on Omani.net named Mohammed Al Harthy, was given a one month prison sentence for defaming the Wali of Ibra.
I could not understand who is going to be paying those damages or how they are going to identify the actual members that made the defamatory posts.
I do not know how the decision was found on this case, I believe that a website owner is responsible for all the content published on his website, whether he posted or not, the question on whether he should be liable for what other people write should be decided on the basis of whether or not he has taken all reasonable actions required to remove any offensive material from his website. Having a disclaimer at the footer of a web page does not limit the liability of the owner in anyway, we can all say and write stuff, but that does not mean it will have any legal effect.
It is not reasonable for a web owner to read every single post made on his forum, especially if it was one with thousands of daily posts, BUT it is reasonable for the administration to review and edit any reported posts or threads, it is reasonable to establish an approval procedure for threads made in sensitive and critical subforums such as the political and the economic subforums. There are many methods for regulating content on online discussion boards, there are loads of software features that come with these forums that could be used to facilitate the proper management of a discussion board.
When deciding a case for the liability of the owner of a forum for content that he has not made himself, the court should examine all the possible actions that he could have taken to remove or minimise the damage of that offensive material, once they are satisfied that he has done everything reasonable for him to do, he should not be found guilty and it should not matter who was offended or how much damage was caused by that offensive material. If you ask me if I think that the administration of Sabla has taken all reasonable action to minimise the impact of offensive material on Sablat Al Arab or not, my answer would be ‘no’. I think that there was so much to do which was not done.
Anyway, I hope that more people now realise that they can sue when they read something about themselves on Omani discussion boards, they can get compensated, and they can get those offenders fined or even imprisoned.
Freedom of expression does not mean infringing the rights of other people, it does not give people the right to insult others or start rumours.
