Web defamation suit has Silicon Valley bigs on alert

Silicon Valley bigwigs Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin are scared . . . of a cheerleader.

A federal appeals court in Cincinnati heard arguments Thursday in a case that pits former Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones against gossip website TheDirty.com.

Jones had won a $338,000 lower-court judgment after the site in 2009 published an anonymous third-party post claiming the bouncy booster “slept with every other Bengal football player.”

Another post accused Jones’ husband of sleeping around and giving his wife two venereal diseases.

Jones sued for defamation of character.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Google’s Brin are part of a tech group that filed an amicus brief in the case asking that the award be overturned.

Silicon Valley firms fear that they, too, could be held responsible for what other people post on their websites.

A confirmation of the ruling “would threaten to cripple vibrant discourse and commerce on the Internet,” the group of nine tech companies, which also include Twitter, told the court.

It is not known when the appeals court will rule.

Last year, a federal court jury found that TheDirty.com was responsible for posting defamatory pictures and commentary about Jones’ personal life.

Judge William Bertelsman, who presided over the trial, found that the jury was right to hold TheDirty.com liable because its founder, Hooman Abedi Karamian, aka Nik Richie, “played a significant role in ‘developing’ the offensive content.”

Richie cherry-picked which posts got play on his site, added his own arguably defamatory commentary to the posts and “invited and encouraged” such posts from his “Dirty Army” of gossipers, the judge said.

Still, TheDirty.com’s lawyer David Gingrass warned on Thursday that the ramifications of an affirmation of the ruling will be broad.

“The Internet will have a nuclear meltdown,” Gingrass told Cincinnati new station WLWT.