China's first lawsuit over internet blog libel has been dismissed, the Beijing News has reported on Tuesday. The People's Court of Haidian District in Beijing has ruled that the defendant did in fact smear the plaintiff's reputation and must post a public apology on his blog for 30 days and pay a compensation fine of 1010 yuan, according to the report.
 
45-year-old Shen Yang filed a lawsuit against Zhang Ming, a senior student at Yangzhou University, in mid-August 2006, claiming Zhang had written slanderous comments about Shen in his personal space on a blog website, which the plaintiff said did great damage to his reputation.

Shen also brought an accusation against the Beijing Blog Information Technology Corp., the company who runs the blog website, blaming them for breach of duty in supervising the user's blog content.

During the first court session on August 18, Zhang admitted that he did put those words in his blog; he said he had afterwards sent e-mails to apologize and suggested that they end the dispute in private, but Shen refused.

As an editor for website, Shen met Zhang on the Internet and they had several online conversations, but they all ended negatively because of differences of opinion. Shen came across the Zhang's defamatory remarks while he was casually browsing the blog website.

The court concluded that the website company was not to be held responsible in the case. The company explained that due to the way the site works, they can only check the content after the blog user has already posted a message. Since Zhang's offensive words were deleted by the company right after Shen brought it to their attention, the company had no breach of duty.

Shen's request for Zhang to pay compensation in the amount of 10 thousand yuan was overruled.

In the end, Zhang is not satisfied with the court's ruling and has filed another lawsuit against Shen in Yangzhou Court in Jiangsu Province.

(CRI September 12, 2006)