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Number 14. No. Number 9. The leisure Smith appellant versus the people in the city.

In October of 1959, the Supreme Court heard the story of a leisure Smith, a Los Angeles bookstore owner.

The appellant in this case if the court please was convicted and given a 30-day jail term for the possession in his bookstore of a hard-covered book entitled Sweet of the Life.

The facts are undispeed. There's no question, but that is to Smith own the store and the book wasn't fact in the store.

The book, which was an erotic novel, was also illegal in 1950's LA.

So Smith is arrested and he is convicted under a Los Angeles ordinance that says, if you merely sell obscene materials, even if you've not read them and you don't know about them,

you can go to jail.

That's Jeff Kassif, Jeff's a law professor who, despite the overused expression, literally wrote the book on the most important law underpinning the modern internet, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

And to understand that law's origins, Jeff says we need to know about a leisure Smith.

And fortunately for him, a civil liberties attorney takes his case all the way up to the US Supreme Court.

The court held that the LA ordinance violated the First Amendment because it applied whether or not a bookseller had even read the book in question.

So what it effectively does is that it imposes a duty on the distributor of this content to pre-screen everything.

And the Supreme Court said, you know, that's just too much of a chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech.

So they strike down this Los Angeles ordinance and that really is what sets the playing field over the next few decades for all sorts of claims, usually against bookstores and magazine stands, that are both civil claims, so defamation lawsuits, as well as criminal actions, like obscenity cases, that are brought against the distributor of content that someone else has created.

It also set the stage for the creation of a law, Section 230, that has shielded internet giants and social media companies from legal liability for what users say on their platforms, in the same way that a leisure Smith wasn't liable for what was inside a book in his store.

But now the Supreme Court is set to hear a case on Section 230, one that could fundamentally alter a big text business model.

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