Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox

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Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox
Court	United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Full case name	'Obsidian Finance Group, LLC and Kevin D. Padrick v. Crystal Cox
Decided	January 17, 2014
Case history
Prior action(s)	District Court hold that Cox is denied protection under Oregon's media shield statutes and retraction statutes because she is not a journalist.
Subsequent action(s)	New trial on the blog post at issue.
Holding
First Amendment negligence standard for private defamation actions is not limited to cases with institutional media defendants and Cox as a blogger could not be held liable for defamation unless she acted negligently.
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Arthur Alarcón, Milan Smith, and Andrew D. Hurwitz
Keywords
Defamation Law, Media Shield Law

Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox is a 2011 case from the United States District Court for the District of Oregon concerning online defamation. Plaintiffs Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick sued Crystal Cox for maintaining several blogs that accused Obsidian and Padrick of corrupt and fraudulent conduct. The court dismissed most of Cox's blog posts as opinion, but found one single post to be more factual in its assertions and therefore defamatory. For that post, the court awarded the plaintiffs $2.5 million in damages. This case is notable for the court's ruling that Cox, as an internet blogger, was not a journalist and was thus not protected by Oregon's media shield laws,^[1] although the court later clarified that its ruling did not categorically exclude blogs from being considered media and indicated that its decision was based in part upon Cox offering to remove negative posts for a $2,500 fee.^[2] In January 2014 the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court's judgment awarding compensatory damages to the bankruptcy trustee.^[3] It also ordered a new trial on the blog post at issue.^[3]