Mr. T. J. McIntyre:

The majority would be settled. The number of cases that have gone to judgment is very limited. The one Irish written judgment on the point is a case called Mulvany v. Betfair which involved allegations against Betfair regarding comments a user made in their chat forum. The Betfair case illustrates the answer to Deputy O'Donovan's second question which concerned the liability in these situations. The liability in these situations is governed by the e-commerce directive which provides for so-called hosting liability. If a social networking site hosts comments a user makes, it is not liable for the comments until it has been notified of them and given an opportunity to take them down. If a network is notified that these comments are defamatory, in breach of the criminal law or in contempt of court and fails to take them down at that point, it faces liability. That aims to strike a balance between avoiding the need to, for example, pre-moderate the many hours of content uploaded to YouTube every second and allowing an individual whose rights have been infringed to seek redress.