No. 21-1146

JONATHAN MONSARRAT,

Plaintiff, Appellant,

v.

RON NEWMAN,

Defendant, Appellee.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

[Hon. Richard G. Stearns, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Kayatta, Lipez, and Gelpí, Circuit Judges.

Richard A. Goren, with whom The Law Office of Richard Goren, Ryan D. Sullivan, and Sullivan Legal, PC were on brief, for appellant. Dan Booth, with whom Dan Booth Law LLC was on brief, for appellee.

March 10, 2022 KAYATTA, Circuit Judge. Ron Newman, a moderator of a neighborhood's online forum, copied the forum's discussion threads and then reposted them to a new online platform. The reposted threads included comments that allegedly defamed the plaintiff Jonathan Monsarrat. The threads also included a communication by Monsarrat for which he had obtained a registered copyright. Monsarrat alleges that Newman is liable for defamation and for copyright infringement arising from those actions. Granting a motion to dismiss the complaint, the district court held that Newman established two affirmative defenses to Monsarrat's claims: immunity from liability under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as to Monsarrat's defamation claim and fair use as to Monsarrat's copyright claim. For the following reasons, we agree and affirm the dismissal of Monsarrat's complaint.

I.

We start by reciting the essential facts as alleged in Monsarrat's complaint, supplemented by relevant undisputed items. See McCloskey v. Mueller, 446 F.3d 262, 264 (1st Cir. 2006). Between 2002 and 2017, residents of Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, used the Russian-owned social networking platform LiveJournal as an online bulletin board and community forum for topics of interest to the neighborhood. Monsarrat, an entrepreneur who develops augmented reality video games, was a member of this online community. Beginning in 2010, anonymous

- 2 - users, writing under pseudonyms, made several defamatory posts concerning Monsarrat on the Davis Square forum, including statements accusing Monsarrat of being a "sexual predator" and a "child predator." Monsarrat responded with a pair of lawsuits (unrelated to the present action) -- one in 2013 seeking damages for the defamatory posts and another in 2017 seeking the removal of a different webpage that referenced the posts.

In April 2017, LiveJournal revised its terms of service to comply with Russian law, which permits censorship of certain online content. After this change, Newman, a moderator for the Davis Square forum, decided to move the forum from LiveJournal to another social networking platform called Dreamwidth, which was not subject to Russian censorship and was open to content no longer welcome on LiveJournal after its terms of service revision. To move the Davis Square forum from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, Newman copied the forum's discussion threads from the LiveJournal website and reposted them on the new Dreamwidth website. The threads as reposted in toto on the new host included both the allegedly defamatory posts relating to Monsarrat as well as a post authored by Monsarrat for which he had obtained a certificate of registration from the United States Copyright Office. The posts copied to Dreamwidth from LiveJournal appear to be substantively unchanged, with the original authors, dates, and message intact.