Trade Libel

It's been a busy month or so for the California anti-SLAPP statute (Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 425.16). In late October, a California trial court granted Perez Hilton's motion to strike in Ronson v. Lavandeira. More recently, another court granted the anti-SLAPP motion of Richard Silverstein and Joel Beinin in the poltically charged case, Neuwirth v. Silverstein. Adding to this list, last Friday, in Eagle Broadband v. Mould, 2007 WL 4358515 (Cal. Ct. App. Dec. 14, 2007), a California appellate court upheld the trial court's grant of Thomas Mould's motion to strike pursuant to the anti-SLAPP statute and reversed the trial court's denial of Richard Williams's similar motion. The appellate court also affirmed the trial court's award of approximately $65,000 in attorney's fees to Mould pursuant to the statute.  read more »

Tomorrow we officially launch our Legal Threats Database, a catalog of the growing number of lawsuits, cease-and-desist letters, and other legal challenges faced by those engaging in online speech. As many of our readers are no doubt aware, the individual threat entries have been available for some time, but starting tomorrow users will be able to view the entire database and search the entries using a number of fields, including location, legal claim, publication medium, and content type.

The database already contains a fascinating array of lawsuits, as well as more informal threats like cease-and-desist letters and emails. Its several-hundred entries are growing daily. One of the most exciting aspects of the database is the ability it gives our users to input new threat entries, whether based on their own experiences or their knowledge of legal threats faced by friends or colleagues. One of our users, blogger Tabatha Marshall of Washington State, created a new threat entry this weekend. We followed up with her, obtained additional information, and edited the entry for publication. In this post, I'll excerpt for you the "Description" portion of the resulting database entry, Internet Solutions v. Marshall:

On November 1, 2007, Internet Solutions, a company that runs a number of employment recruiting and Internet advertising businesses, including VeriResume, sued blogger Tabatha Marshall in federal court in Florida.   read more »

A recent case from Texas highlights the difficulty of identifying the correct legal standard for determining when a court should order disclosure of the identity of an anonymous person engaging in speech on the Internet. In June 2007, a subsidiary of Essent Healthcare, Inc. filed suit in Texas state court against an anonymous blogger and an undefined number of anonymous posters to his blog. Essent's petition contains claims for defamation, trade disparagement, breach of contract, and breach of the duty of loyalty.

The case revolves around a blog called "The-Paris-site," which focuses on Essent's Paris Regional Medical Center (the "Hospital") in Paris, Texas. The operator of the blog goes by the pseudonyms "Frank Pasquale" (no relation to the law professor) and "fac_p". He posted critical remarks about the Hospital on the blog, including statements that, according to Essent, assert or imply that the Hospital is engaged in Medicare fraud. He also posted statements that allegedly accuse the Hospital of having a high incidences of bacterial infections and of post-surgical complications.   read more »