2 DELFI AS v. ESTONIA JUDGMENT THE FACTS I. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE CASE 6. The applicant company is a public limited company (aktsiaselts), registered in Estonia. A. Background of the case 7. The applicant company is the owner of Delfi, an Internet news portal that publishes up to 330 news articles a day. Delfi is one of the largest news portals on the Internet in Estonia. It publishes news in Estonian and Russian in Estonia and also operates in Latvia and Lithuania. 8. At the material time, at the end of the body of the news articles there were the words “add your comment” and fields for comments, the commenter’s name and his or her email address (optional). Below these fields there were buttons “publish the comment” and “read comments”. The part for reading comments left by others was a separate area which could be accessed by clicking on the “read comments” button. The comments were uploaded automatically and were, as such, not edited or moderated by the applicant company. The articles received about 10,000 readers’ comments daily, the majority posted under pseudonyms. 9. Nevertheless, there was a system of notify-and-take-down in place: any reader could mark a comment as leim (an Estonian word for an insulting or mocking message or a message inciting hatred on the Internet) and the comment was removed expeditiously. Furthermore, there was a system of automatic deletion of comments that included certain stems of obscene words. In addition, a victim of a defamatory comment could directly notify the applicant company, in which case the comment was removed immediately. 10. The applicant company had made efforts to advise users that the comments were not its opinion and that the authors of comments were responsible for their content. On Delfi’s Internet site there were “Rules of comment” which included the following: “The Delfi message board is a technical medium allowing users to publish comments. Delfi does not edit comments. An author of a comment is liable for his/her comment. It is worth noting that there have been cases in the Estonian courts where authors have been punished for the contents of a comment ... Delfi prohibits comments the content of which does not comply with good practice. These are comments that: - contain threats;