Well, this doesn’t happen every day. TheWrap’s appeal of a lawsuit has prompted a change to a California statute protecting online news sites from frivolous libel actions — a change that was long overdue in the age of the Internet.
On Sept. 28, Governor Jerry Brown approved an amendment passed by the California legislature to AB 998, which covers libel and damages. The statute severely limits damages that can be demanded from a newspaper unless a correction has been demanded in a timely manner. (Here’s the law, by the way.)
The statute has now been updated to include digital news publications to that protection, by changing the wording: “the correction statute applies to weekly and online publications performing the same news-disseminating function as a daily newspaper.”