New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Barry Albin

*This article has been updated to include comments from the plaintiffs' counsel, James Prusinowski*

Bringing defamation law in line with the internet age, the New Jersey Supreme Court on Monday held that the single publication rule applies to a defamatory article posted online, but said significant changes to such a posting restart the statute of limitations.

The court didn't give media-side lawyers everything they wanted in Petro-Lubricant Testing Laboratories v. Adelman, but did hold that internet articles based on legitimate court filings are protected by the First Amendment through the fair reporting privilege.

“We hold now that the single publication rule applies to an internet article,” wrote Justice Barry Albin for the court. “However, if a material or substantive change is made to the article's defamatory content, then the modified article will constitute republication, restarting the [one-year] statute of limitations.”

A ”material change” is “one that relates to the defamatory content of the article at issue,” but “is not a technical website modification or the posting on the website of another article with no connection to the original defamatory article,” the court said.

A “substantive change” is “one that alters the meaning of the original defamatory article or is essentially a new defamatory statement incorporated into the original article” but “is not the mere reconfiguring of sentences or substitution of words that are not susceptible of conveying a new defamatory meaning to the article,” the court said.

The court rejected the argument that modifications meant to “soften” the allegedly defamatory material should not be considered a republication.

In the case at issue—involving a defamation suit against blog “eBossWatch” over a posting from seven years ago about Petro-Lubricant Testing Laboratories Inc. of Lafayette and its founder and CEO John Wintermute—the court ruled that material and substantive changes were made, but the article, because it was based on a court filing, cannot support the suit.

That article, Albin said, is protected by the fair reporting privilege.

“The right of citizens to have transparency in government and court proceedings is one of the basic pillars undergirding the fair report privilege,” he said. “[A] public document on file with the New Jersey judiciary … is protected by the fair report privilege.

“The article is a full, fair, and accurate recitation of a court-filed complaint,” Albin said of the eBossWatch article.

Justice Lee Solomon, in a concurring opinion joined by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and Justice Walter Timpone, agreed with the ultimate outcome in the case at issue, but said the changes made to the article were not significant enough to amount to republication. Thus, the lawsuit, Solomon said, should have been dismissed because it was filed outside of the one-year statute of limitations.

“I join with the majority's affirmance, but disagree with its reasoning,” Solomon wrote. “I find no republication because the modifications, with which the majority takes issue, did not add additional information to the original post … and did not substantively change its content as a matter of law[.]”

The suit, naming the eBossWatch site and founder Asher Adelman, had been dismissed as untimely.

According to court documents, Adelman launched eBossWatch in 2007 as a way for visitors to rate their bosses, and for job candidates to access those reviews. The site also posts annual rankings of “America's Worst Bosses,” a list on which Wintermute occupied the 39th spot in 2010, the court documents stated.