A 2017 New Yorker magazine email to subscribers circulating a story from 2010 that was the basis of a defamation lawsuit—in which four passages were deemed “susceptible to defamatory connotation” in one of numerous court rulings before the suit was dismissed—does not constitute a republication of the article for defamation purposes, a state appeals court has ruled.

In a terse opinion, an Appellate Division, First Department panel, which ultimately dismissed the newly filed defamation lawsuit on statute-of-limitation grounds, wrote that “the email sent by defendant to New Yorker magazine subscribers in April 2017 containing a hyperlink to an article published in the magazine in July 2010 does not constitute republication of the article.”