A judge has rejected claims that Craigslist is both a public nuisance and a pimp. The verdict threw out a civil complaint by an Illinois sheriff.

Tom Dart, sheriff of Cook County (home to Chicago), had asked the court to force the listings site to stop including adult services listings. There’s little argument that many, and probably most, of the ads in these listings are for prostitution services. However, the ongoing nationwide legal row has been what responsibility Craigslist bears for its involvement in allowing these ads to be published.

As had always seemed likely, the Illinois case was dismissed under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996. While the act regulates pornographic and other adult content on the internet, section 230 states:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Dart’s case appeared particularly ambitious, including a claim that Craigslist arranges meetings between prostitutes and clients and directs the clients to the relevant location. The judge concluded that “these allegations strain the ordinary meaning of the terms ‘arrange’ and ‘direct’.”

The verdict is not necessary binding on courts in other states, though it would certainly make a powerful argument in similar cases.

The judgment will be particularly unwelcome in the office of Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general. She met Craigslist lawyers in May and demanded the entire erotic services section of the site be shut down, publicly calling it “nothing more than an Internet brothel.”

Perhaps the most interesting revelation of the case is that the adult services business isn’t immune from declining standards of spelling and grammar. Witness this advert, which is surely the only time this particular phrase has been cited in a court document:

HELLO GENTELMEN NOW YOU MEET JADE AND TIPHANY WE DO TWO GIRL SHOWS AND INDIVISUAL CALLS!! WE GARAUNTEE THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE!!!

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Entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 10:39 am under Adult content, Legal.

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