Connecticut

You know you've got a pretty good job when you turn to the first order of business for the day and read this:

NOW COMES Defendant, A horse walks into a bar, a.k.a. Ryan Mariner ("Mariner"), and specially appears, without having been properly served and without waiving his right to proper service, and files this Brief in Support of his Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff's Second Amended Complaint against him.

One of the John Doe defendants in the sprawling AutoAdmit litigation has come out swinging, revealing his true identity and asserting that he "has done nothing wrong." Ryan Mariner, formerly known as "A horse walks into a bar," filed a motion to dismiss on Wednesday in federal court in Connecticut, asking the court to set him free from the case, which has been going on for over a year. 

He argues that the two anonymous Yale Law students who are plaintiffs in the case have willfully failed to serve him and prosecute the action against him, despite repeated offers by his counsel to accept service of the complaint. He argues that the plaintiffs' only possible motive for continuing to name him as a defendant in their second amended complaint and yet failing to serve him "seems to be to threaten and harass him by abusing the legal system." Ouch!

Mariner opens up a surprisingly literary can of whup-ass:   read more »

The AutoAdmit case (formerly Doe v. Ciolli) never fails to satisfy. If the whole situation were not absurd enough already, one of the pseudonymous posters going by the handle "AK47" has filed a motion to quash a subpoena issued by the plaintiffs to AT&T seeking information about his identity. The plaintiffs apparently were able to tie a comment attributed to AK47 in the Amended Complaint to an IP address owned by AT&T. (I'm not going to reproduce the statement here, but if you're interested, his pointless and despicable comment is found in paragraph 49 of the Amended Complaint.)

Back in January, the federal district court in Connecticut authorized the plaintiffs to issue subpoenas to a number of ISPs, universities, and websites demanding information about
the identities of the the pseudonymous posters named in the lawsuit. According to AK47's brief in support of his motion to quash, he received notice of the subpoena from AT&T on or around February 18, and it stated that he had ten days to take legal action to prevent AT&T from divulging his information. Instead of filing a motion to quash in California federal court, AK47 took action in federal court in Connecticut, where the main action in the lawsuit is taking place.  read more »

Last Thursday, the plaintiffs in the AutoAdmit case filed a motion for expedited discovery, seeking permission to serve subpoenas on a number of ISPs, universities, and websites demanding information about the identities of the the pseudonymous posters named in the lawsuit. (For background on this case and links to the court documents, see the CMLP database entry, Doe v. Ciolli.) The plaintiffs believe that these ISPs, institutions, and websites either assigned IP addresses to some of the defendants, were used by some defendants to send email, or have relevant IP addresses because some defendants visited their sites shortly before posting on AutoAdmit threads.

Before filing the motion, the plaintiffs informally contacted AutoAdmit and its administrators, several ISPs, hosting providers, and others, requesting that they voluntarily turn over identifying information about the pseudonymous posters. All of the recipients refused, and now the plaintiffs want the court's help to make them comply. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, it looks like many of the recipients do not have the information that they're looking for anyway. Many indicated that they do not compile logs of the information sought or had already disposed of those logs before being contacted by the plaintiffs.  read more »

Yesterday, lawyers for two female Yale Law School students, captioned as Does I & II, filed an amended complaint dropping Anthony Ciolli as a defendant from the lawsuit they filed against a host of pseudonymous users of the popular law school admissions forum, AutoAdmit. The suit, which has engendered a great deal of publicity (see, e.g., The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal Law Blog), charges that users of the site made defamatory, vulgar, sexually explicit, and threatening comments about the Yale students on AutoAdmit's forum.

Ciolli, the former chief education director of the site, was almost certainly immune from liability under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so it is no surprise that he has been dropped from the suit.

You can read about the details of the lawsuit -- and download the pleadings -- by accessing our legal threat entry, Doe v. Ciolli.

UPDATE: I had incorrectly identified Anthony Ciolli as an administrator of the AutoAdmit site; his correct title was chief education director and administrator of AutoAdmit Studies.  I've corrected the title and body of the this post to reflect this information.