Anonymity

Eclipse Aviation, a manufacturer of "affordable" jets, recently sent a subpoena to Google seeking to uncover the identities of 28 users who posted on Eclipse Aviation Critic NG, a blog that Google hosts on its Blogger service.

The subpoena, which includes a colorful list of pseudonyms such as "Turn-and-Burn," "Bill E. Goat," and "Niner Zulu," does not state why the information is necessary. AINonline, an aviation news site, gives us a bit more insight:   read more »

Last week, Republican Tim Couch of Kentucky introduced a bill in the state legislature that would impose criminal fines on Kentucky-based website operators who fail to collect "a legal name, address, and electronic mail address" before allowing a user to post a comment. The proposed law would also require website operators to "establish reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name, address, and valid electronic email address of [a user] who posts false or defamatory information about the person."

Hmm . . . This looks like a transparent attempt to get around the First Amendment protection for anonymous online speech recognized in a slew of recent and not-so-recent cases, including Doe v. Cahill, Mobilisa v. Doe, Krinsky v. Doe 6, Essent v. Doe, and Greenbaum v. Google. Entirely appropriately, Marc Randazza takes Couch out to the woodshed for failing to appreciate not only the state of the law but also the importance of anonymous speech to our nation's history.

Putting aside the First Amendment issue, Couch's bill suffers from a host of practical difficulties. Ryan Paul at Ars Technica, also fired up by the stupidity of the proposal, writes:   read more »

Breaking news from Above the Law: Anthony Ciolli, former defendant in the controversial AutoAdmit case, has filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court against the two plaintiffs in that case, their lawyers, ReputationDefender and one of its employees, and the shadowy "T14 Talent." He alleges wrongful initiation of civil proceedings, abuse of process, libel, slander, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contract, and unauthorized use of name or likeness. It looks like Ciolli has outed one of the pseudonymous defendants in the AutoAdmit case -- "pauliewalnuts."

Here's the complaint -- we're still digesting it.

Update:  I didn't mean to be snarky about this lawsuit. Assuming that his allegations are true, I have a lot of sympathy for Ciolli, and he appears to have some actionable claims. Marc Randazza, his attorney in the AutoAdmit case, has a thoughtful post on the new lawsuit.

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 »

This is the third in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide we published in January. As we roll out new sections of the guide each month, we will highlight some of the more important topics in blog posts.

In the first two posts we discussed choosing a business form for your online activities and the issues associated with selecting a platform for online speech. In this post we discuss the legal and practical issues you should consider if you wish to engage in anonymous speech online.

Putting aside the possible legal challenges to anonymity for the time being, there are some practical considerations that you should think about before deciding to carry out your online publishing activities anonymously or pseudonymously.   read more »

A California appellate court issued a new anonymity decision yesterday in Krinsky v. Doe 6, H030767 (Cal. Ct. App. Feb. 6, 2008). (For background on the facts of the case, see the CMLP database entry, Krinsky v. Doe 6.) In line with the recent trend towards increased protection for anonymous speech online, the California court came out with a test that puts a significant evidentiary burden on a plaintiff before allowing disclosure of an anonymous Internet speaker's identity.

The court explicitly rejected the lenient "good faith" standard applied in In re Subpoena Duces Tecum to America Online, 2000 WL 1210372 (Vir. Cir. Ct. Jan. 31, 2000), indicating that this test "offers no practical, reliable way to determine the plaintiff's good faith and leaves the speaker with little protection." Interestingly, however, the court also declined to follow Doe v. Cahill, 884 A.2d 451 (Del. 2005), arguing that the "summary judgment" terminology used in that case is "unnecessary and potentially confusing."   read more »

Sam Bayard blogged previously about James Goodale's article on CDA 230 and the highly publicized AutoAdmit case. In the article, Goodale argues that CDA 230, the federal law that shields providers of "interactive computer service[s]" from liability for defamation and other torts for publishing the statements of third parties, should be amended to impose liability in cases where a website operator "knowingly causes defamation by refusing to take down libelous posts."

On Sunday, on his show "Digital Age," Goodale moderated a discussion between Michael Fertik, the CEO of ReputationDefender.com, and Beth Simone Noveck, a professor at New York Law School, about CDA 230, anonymity, and the AutoAdmit case.

You can also watch it on Google Video.

(Note: James Goodale is on the board of advisors for the CMLP.)

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 »

Last month, an investigator at Kansas University delivered a search warrant to the Lawrence Journal-World, a highly regarded newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, demanding access to their computer servers in order to get information about the identity of a user who had posted comments on the paper's website, LJWorld.com. The warrant, which appears to violate the federal Privacy Protection Act, raises serious concerns about governmental overreaching and highlights the need for adequate procedural protections for anonymous online speech.   read more »