may please the court this case comes here based upon some various business dealings between the parties that went sour and in particular mr cabals complaint was based largely in part complaint that count three was dismissed on the basis of illinois one year statute limitation as the last identifiable original posting from the defendant had been made exactly one year and one day before the three he the defendant had filed a motion for sanctions on the basis that in part that counts three should not have been included because it had been dismissed as barred by the statue limitations he didn't so he was definitely aware of that the more recent post he was aware of its relevance at least as he saw it toward one of the claims but he didn't seek to amend his libel claim that is correct and i think that's actually part and parcel of one of our main arguments not appeal didn't recognize the fact that that would have resurrected his claim and one of our arguments is that as a pro se litigant that the district court should have recognized that and brought that either to his attention of work coach a pro se litigant about how to present his claims more effectively i don't think we're going quite that far i you know i am mindful i do not expect the district court to become an advocate i think i put that i think i wrote that in our brief you know that's not the expectation but i think the realisation at this point that you know that here's fresh postings that he identified what you're describing is an adversarial frame of mind that is is that the district judge is required to look at the complaint view the briefs on the motion to dismiss and figure out how could this point if save this case i think are the circumstances as presented in this case i believe that that would have been proper it certainly would not have been improper the improper the judge has the discretion to do that by imposing that as a duty on district judges  of how we deal with pro se litigants and i certainly i would add something on what the supreme court said because the possibility that judge hamilton mention was raised explicitly by the petitioner in a case called mcneil against the united states be interpreted so as to excuse mistakes by those who proceed without counsel i so i wonder whether your argument is consistent with m i don't know that i'm suggesting that is an absolute requirement but i think under the circumstances i think it was pretty clear that this is one of the first things that popped out of me i was not counsel and he was pro se and one of the first things i realized when i looked at the record as opposed to any of the other counts some of them were clearly properly dismissed without question but i again i don't think it would have been improper for the judge to do so to require him to do cylinder under other circumstances i don't think makes a whole lot of sense he certainly wouldn't ever ask for that sort of relief you know had somebody been represented by counsel so i just think under the circumstances that you know that's something he probably should have done the second aspect of our argument is that in dismissing count three judge asked ben apply the illinois had been updated and exactly one year to the day before the original complaint was filed and the the just the result of that is it took a posting that had and existed for such an period time that it went so far down the list in terms of what somebody might find if they were going on an internet search for mr obama is a came right back off the top of the list and that gets into the whole  discussion as to search logic i think the current search engine optimisation it's sort of emerging thing at this point could i ask you to spend at least a little bit of time looking into illinois law on this case law on the single publication rule and one case that looks pretty similar to this was the founding church of scientology against the american medical association and the that all fell within the single publication right i that i have i know i've read that case i am familiar with that generally i don't recall the specific reasoning behind that i know that that that particular opinion was cited in the blair versus nevada landing case which is which judge asked and didn't rely on it in dismissing  three and it that case my understanding was that the determination the same determination the judge asked in game two was that the republic  mediums and things like that and they said well because they were all used for the same purpose and that was to advertise i believe it was a can see now that that and therefore it was one single publication  newspaper and that example provides that those are actually two separate publications because they are specifically designed to reach different audiences notwithstanding the fact that is the exact same content a methodology publishing it and so we think that this what happened here is very akin to that and it goes again like i said to the various search logic that's involved when you have something that's posted on a website or even more of a website itself when you do a search the more content that's on it the more times it's been hit the more times people have seen it the closer up to the top the more find it will it is after a period of time has elapsed it goes down in the rankings and it's not so easily identifiable so we think that the conscious independent act of republication at this point was the updating which brought it right back up to the front of the line so that anybody going there would be one of the very first things good afternoon your honour's counsel may please the court my name is david dale i represent the appellee mr derek bourse in this case and today we're asking the court to affirm the district court's decision to dismiss plaintiff's claim of liable your honour's for that there are two distinct issues on appeal today want to procedural in nature and the other involves an issue of subset of law as far as a procedural question is concerned the question is whether the district court abused its discretion in denying the plaintiff the opportunity to a his claim and we think that the record before the court right now demonstrates that not only did the plaintiffs have the opportunity to amend his claim throughout this proceeding he voluntarily way did or otherwise abandon it along the way we think the district court's decision can be affirmed on originally dismissed by the district court plaintiff affirmatively asked to move for reconsideration and also asked for leave to amend but only as to two of those claims tortious interference and i he made no attempt to reconsider to ask the court to reconsider or for leave to amend just to breach claims as well as liable claim and in fact when he filed his amended complaint he only introduced new allegations or facts supporting his claims for torturous interference and i and there was the issue later on between the parties both through the motion to dismiss briefing as well as the sanctions briefing as to whether or not the plaintiff was affirmatively attempting to re litigate his libel claim and he stated in no uncertain terms he was not bringing  information in support of a libel claim he was not attempting to really litigate the level playing i appreciate the plaintiff's contention that a pro se plaintiff should be afforded some sort of leniency in that the district court should take that into consideration i think that the record this before the court shows that this is a very competent pro se plaintiffs who understand procedural issues who understands what he needs to do in order to ask for reconsideration or to ask for leave to amend he understands exactly what needs to be done to leniency in the court can't then step in and recreate a claim for him when he's voluntarily in affirmatively given it up in so far as the second issue which required which discusses the application of the illinois uniform single publication act i think the court can look to its decision and pippen and see that first of all the uniform single publication act does indeed apply to publications that take place on the internet like the ones we have here i mean every day we have  and defendants arguing over claims that are placed on line that appear on sites like yelp or like rip off report here the single publication act was created to ensure that authors writers people who are expressing their opinion aren't going to be subject to liability for their statements and for the rest of their lives there has to be cut off at some point i think the pity was the supposed updated so the argument is that the post was somehow updated because i have from what i understand the plaint think in fact that might because i think it turns on the question of a conscious and independent act to republish either new content or to make it available to a new audience and neither of those instances happened here if you were to go online and we know  t how does something get updated on the record report well then that's the question is an update on rip off report by its own terms and conditions can happen because the complainer himself or herself actually goes online and adds new content updating maybe a resolution of their complaint or for their complaints or frustrations that they weren't getting the resolution they were looking for but the the post can even be updated when people comment on the post below it though the post in question has had comments below it from other people expressing displeasure or either siding with on both sides actually siding on the one hand with the defendant and other people side or not be half the plaintiff now those certainly i wouldn't think would expose the original author to continued liability because they didn't do specifically relating to this supposed update was based on information and belief and that's about it there's no allegations in the complaint that specifically say that the defendant visited the website took some affirmative action created an we still have to look at it and say is there any new content has this been intended to reach a new audience otherwise we're just looking at a newspaper that's been researching later an article that's been republished ten years down the road where the content is exactly the same sort of like the scien that you referred to here there's no argument that the content is exactly the same there has been no update to the cottage as far as audience is concerned this is occurring on the same website rip off report where the original post first happened so the audience is exactly same we disagree as to how the algorithms work with regard to what will push a posting up or down in search engines i think it's not as simple as simply say that you decide the case based on your  engine works and how the algorithms work i think all we need to look at is was the content altered in any fashion and we know the answer and was it intended to reach a new audience well i mean audience of the same website fo years apart or was it reasonable to treat that as a different audience well i think if you look at the nature of the website which is set up to help consumers who have more to allow consumers who have before have an argument with with a company that they've been working with i think that is the same audience that it's everyone who uses this website and everyone who accesses the website either read up on a company or to make their own complaining the audience of the internet i think is a pretty large audience it's go hard unlike a newspaper to parse out ok this newspaper circulation is limited only to this geographical area it is the internet we're talking about the audience is going to be anyone who has wanted to visit the website and either learn about a company or make a complaint of their own so in that regard your honors i think that even if we were to bypass the procedural problems here and go to the subset of laws should i think the court has properly applied the single publication rule here we have to  honor but i think even viewing the two issues independently if we look at that single publication rule no one argues that there's no difference in the content there's no different it's an audience as if we were to reverse course here and to just simply state that any time this complaint appears anywhere on the internet in this form it's now restarted the statute of limitation then we're getting into a whole argument of web crawlers that go out and grab articles and reposed them on websites and we're going to get into dangerous territory of say more but tension there is no statute of limitations for internet postings it could it could last forever if there are no further questions of i'll see the remainder of my time thank you  record the appendix attached to the brief at these thirty six judge in the motion for sanctions action judge aspen recognized that mr boies was in fact arguing that that had been previously been dismissed with prejudice and i don't believe that it's consistent to say that was dismissed with prejudice and you abandon that claim so i think that's a little bit inconsistent and aside from that i would just very very briefly say that i think it's absolutely correct to say that we really don't know that there was a any significant or any actual difference between the original posting and the posting is updated thank you judge cases taken under advisement and the court will be in re