Craigslist is to take its own legal action over a dispute with South Carolina’s attorney general. The site says Henry McMaster should not be continuing with his legal threats now that Craigslist has agreed to changes to its adult service listings.

McMaster wrote to Craigslist two weeks ago demanding that it close all sections of the South Carolina version of the site, which allow advertising by prostitutes. (That’s allow in the sense of ‘make possible’ rather than ‘give permission’.) He gave a 10-day deadline, now expired, before he would pursue legal action.

Craigslist announced last week that it would replace its unmoderated ‘erotic services’ category with one for ‘adult services’ where all ads were vetted by staff to make sure they did not advertise prostitution: placing such adverts is an offense in the state. This didn’t appear sufficient for McMaster who, as soon as the deadline expired, began a formal investigation into the site.

The site has now launched a pre-emptive legal strike against McMaster. It’s filed a request for a declaratory relief and a restraining order. If granted, that would mean a court agreed that McMaster’s threats were unjust and would almost certainly mean that if he did pursue legal action to shut down the site, he’d automatically lose.

Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist, says that not only is McMaster’s demand factually unsound, but that it violates a federal law principle which says that limitations on free speech usually can’t apply pre-emptively.

Buckmaster also argues that the only way to comply with the precise wording of McMaster’s demand is to shut down the entire site as, short of vetting every listing in every category before publication (which would be unworkable given the scale and financial model of Craigslist), there is no way to be certain of guaranteeing an advert for prostitution will never appear anywhere on the site.

Surprisingly McMaster welcomed the news of Craigslist’s legal action saying, “It shows that Craigslist is taking the matter seriously for the first time.”

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 4:14 pm under Adult content, Legal, Politics.

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