International Law

An initial decision on the issue of whether one is legally liable for their tweets was issued last week.

An Ilinois judge ruled that 25 year-old Amanda Bonnen's Twitter revelation that her apartment was moldy and that her apartment management company was fine with it did not amount to libel.

Bonnen's attorneys sought to limit the importance of Twitter itself, noting that most tweets are just "babble." Conversely, the management company believed the tweet to be quite valuable -- it was seeking $50,000 in damages. 

The National Law Journal has the details:

Bonnen's defense team responded that the Tweet in question didn't meet the Illinois standard for defamation on numerous grounds, including that tweets are considered opinion in the social context and that the message lacked factual context and verifiable facts. The motion to dismiss cited a 2009 study of Twitter in which more than 40% of tweets were found to be "pointless babble."

Of course, the ruling doesn't rule out the possibility of a dafamatory or libelous tweet. In Bonnen's instance, the 140-character ramble was just that ? a rambling aside of opinion. With several other lawsuits on the docket to test the culpability of twitter rants, this won't be the last tweet in court.