A Chinese university professor has successfully sued one of the country's largest blog website, Blogcn.com, after it carried defamatory remarks on a blog written by one of his students.

The Gulou District People's Court in Nanjing of Jiangsu Province on Wednesday ordered Blogcn to pay 1,000 yuan (US$125) to Chen Tangfa, associate professor of the School of Journalism at Nanjing University. The court also ordered Blogcn to post a formal apology on its website for 10 days.

A year ago last June the university teacher found slanderous and defamatory insults directed at him in a blog diary of a former student that was hosted by the website Blogcn.com.

Chen immediately called Blogcn's customer service department and asked them to remove the offending blog diary but his request was refused as staff told him they had no right to delete the blog of a registered user.

After further negotiations failed, Chen initiated his suit against Blogcn last December. The case was heard on June 14.

The court heard that Blogger K007 wrote defamatory comments that denigrated Chen's teaching and his teaching materials.

Chen says that while he can guess which one of his students was writing under the pseudonym K007 he didn't want to bring his student to court.

"My purpose in filing a lawsuit against the blog website is that I want to remind Blogcn that it has a role to play in supervising its on-line content," he told Xinhua.

He said that the case shows that personnel dignity overweighs freedom of speech, and it provides a significant example that bloggers can be controlled by law.

Yet K007 disagrees. His or her blog read on Friday shows the "insulting material" was deleted. The blog says K007 felt guilty and so deleted the comments about the teacher. "It's my own responsibility to wipe out the comments not the responsibility of Blogcn," K007 wrote.

The "insulting material" in Yet K007's diary contained words such as "Chen Tangfa is indeed an uncouth person. I can see this from his book. He wrote the worst textbook".

The teacher, who had asked for 10,000 yuan for emotional damages, agrees that people can freely express themselves in cyberspace as long as their comments do not infringe on the rights of others.

"The website has a responsibility to make sure the blogs they host do not violate the law," he said.

Chen hopes the case will bring more discipline and order to cyberspace.

Blogcn spokesperson, Fang Huaifeng, told Xinhua that from now on the website will carefully examine every complaint it receives. If they determine that the blog comments are slanderous or defamatory they will be deleted and the writer will be contacted. "We have a responsibility to ensure the interests of our users and the interests of others, said Fang.

Fang says the court-ordered apology has not yet been posted on Blogcn's website as the company has 15 days to consider if it will appeal the ruling.

Some media are reporting that Chen's is the first lawsuit filed against a blog website in China and it could have a far reaching impact on Chinese bloggers. It has also stirred debate among blog fanatics and legal experts.

"Blogs are not personal diaries that you keep to yourself, the readership can be extremely large over the Internet. So it's imperative Chinese law-makers come up with appropriate regulations," said Ye Yu, a lawyer with the Liuhong Law Firm in Nanjing.

Ye said order in cyber space can only be maintained by introducing regulations or detailed interpretations of related law articles.

Some experts hope laws will require websites to be responsible for supervising their content. They also want netizens to be required to identify themselves when they sign up as users.

Fang Xingdong, CEO of another well-known blog website Bokee.com, said that these issues should be solved through the self-discipline of bloggers themselves.

Yet Blogcn's website lists a set of rules that bloggers are required to follow. The rules say bloggers are not to post libelous and defamatory comments nor messages that disseminate hate, discrimination, insults, superstition, rumor, obscenity and violence.

Yet many blog writers say it would be hard to tightly control and regulate bloggers.

"It would be annoying and offensive to let staff of a website monitor what we write in our own space," said Fang Jing, a Beijing-based blogger.

Fang said the fun of writing blogs will die out if she has to be careful of every sentence she writes online.

Yu Li, a postgraduate student at the Law School of Wuhan University in central China's Hubei Province, argues bloggers' self-discipline is the key.

"It's beyond the scope of websites to supervise every message posted online, because blogs are updated every second," Yu said.

Current regulations in China require websites to delete inappropriate messages posted by its users, but many websites don't have the money, staff or willingness to moderate every comment.

Last year the number of Chinese bloggers reached 16 million, accounting for more than 10 percent of total netizens. Their numbers are expected to top 60 million this year and to near 100 million next year, according to a forecast in the Media Blue Paper 2006, a book published by the prestigious Tsinghua University.

Blogcn was founded on November 18, 2002 and by the end of November last year it had more than 4.5 million registered users, according the company's official website.

(Xinhua News Agency August 5, 2006)