On February 2, 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a self-regulatory body of Hungarian internet content providers and an internet news portal are not liable for offensive reader comments posted on their websites. According to the press release, the two companies used notice-and-take-down-systems, which allow users to indicate unlawful comments to the service providers who will remove them, as well as providing in their general terms and conditions that the writers themselves are accountable for their comments. In February 2010, the news portal posted a story about a real estate firm’s marketing strategies, which “attracted offensive and vulgar comments” on both websites. The real estate company sued the internet portals, alleging that the comments had damaged its reputation, and won in the national courts who found that the comments “went beyond the acceptable limits of freedom of expression, stressing that the applicants, by enabling readers to make comments on their websites, had assumed liability for readers’ injurious or unlawful comments.” The Court disagreed, ruling that “the Hungarian courts . . . had not carried out a proper balancing exercise between the competing rights involved, namely between the applicants’ right to freedom of expression and the real estate websites’ right to respect for its commercial reputation.” It further distinguished the present case from a recent decision imposing liability on internet portals, noting that it was “devoid of the pivotal elements of hate speech and incitement to violence. Although offensive and vulgar, the comments had not constituted clearly unlawful speech.” The Court concluded that the notice-and-take-down-system in conjunction with the companies’ fast response “could function in many cases as an appropriate tool for balancing the rights and interests of all those involved.”