Defamation

Earlier this week, Perez Hilton sued fellow gossip-blogger Jonathan Jaxson for libel, slander, invasion of privacy, harassment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Jaxson, the former publicist for the Backstreet Boys whose real name is Jonathan Wayne Lewandowski, operates a blog called JJ's Dirt that feeds the public's apparently unlimited hunger for celebrity gossip.

The complaint, which Hilton filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that Jaxson slandered him by stating that Hilton had solicited sexual favors from Jaxson in exchange for help promoting Jaxson’s website. The complaint specifically refers to a February 28 article in the New York Post in which Jaxson stated that Hilton encouraged him to send sex tapes of himself. "He would tell me he would give me stories for my blog," Jaxson told the Post. "He used me."

Hilton also claims that statements Jaxson made to ABC News, Popcrunch.com, and HollywoodCrap.com, were defamatory. According to ABC News.com and allegations in Hilton's complaint:   read more »

A quick update on the Internet Solutions v. Marshall case, which I've blogged about at length previously. This case is significant to us because Tabatha Marshall, the defendant, was the first user of our website to submit information about her case through our threat entry form.

Yesterday, a federal district court in Florida dismissed the lawsuit against Marshall, who is a Washington resident, holding that it lacked personal jurisdiction over her. The court held that exercising personal jurisdiction over Marshall would violate the Due Process Clause because she lacked minimum contacts with Florida. Specifically, the court determined that Marshall's website, www.tabathamarshall.com, did not justify hailing her into a Florida court because it was equally accessible to persons in all states and because Marshall's posts did "not specifically mention Florida or its residents." The court therefore distinguished the pre-Internet Supreme Court case, Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783 (1984), which held that a California court could exercise jurisdiction over two Florida reporters who had "specifically target[ed] a California audience, ma[de] large distributions in California, and publish[ed] articles about a California resident."

Marc Randazza has additional commentary.

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 »

Earlier this week, a federal District Court judge in Maryland more than halved a $10.9 million jury verdict against the Westboro Baptist Church, a fundamentalist Christian church in Kansas, and three of its leading members. Among other things, the church publishes a website at "www.godhatesfags.com" and advocates the view that God kills U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as punishment for America's tolerance of homosexuality. Westboro Baptist has gained notoriety in recent years for staging protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers in order to draw attention to its message.

Albert Snyder, a Pennsylvania man whose son was killed in Iraq, sued Westboro Baptist, its pastor Fred W. Phelps, Sr., and members of his congregation after they picketed the funeral of Snyder's son, Matthew, holding up signs with slogans like "God hates you," "Thank God for dead soldiers," and "You're going to hell."   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 »

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 »

In a case of first impression in Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the "single publication rule," which states that the statute of limitations period for libel begins to run when a defamatory statement is first published, applies to publications on the Internet.

Some background on the case: on July 29, 2003, the Dallas Morning News published -- in print and on its website -- an allegedly defamatory article by financial writer Scott Burns about an accelerated mortgage program offered by Nationwide Bi-Weekly Administration, a company that provides mortgage payment services for borrowers. The article, among other things, accused Nationwide of engaging in deceptive business practices.

Nationwide filed a complaint in Ohio state court, near where it is based, on July 28, 2004, asserting claims for defamation, tortious interference with prospective business relations, and business disparagement against the Dallas Morning News, its owner Belo Corp., and Burns. Nationwide did not, however, serve the complaint on any of the defendants until June 2005. (Shortly thereafter, the defendants successfully removed the case to federal court in Ohio, whereupon the court transferred venue to the Northern District of Texas.)
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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 »

This weekend I came accross a recent case, In re Subpoena Issued Pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to: 43SB.COM, LLC, 2007 WL 4335441 (D. Idaho Dec. 7, 2007). The decision came down earlier this month, but I hadn't read anything about it until now, which is surpising because it is a veritable smörgåsbord of some of our favorite topics -- anonymity, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and lawyers threatening to sue for copyright infringement of their cease-and-desist letters. The case provides a clear example of a party attempting to use the controversial "administrative subpoena" provision of the DMCA (found at 17 U.S.C § 512(h)) to circumvent the safeguards imposed by courts before ordering disclosure of the identity of an anonymous poster in defamation cases. Fortunately, the federal district court in Idaho rejected this gambit, although overall its decision leaves something to be desired. Here's the background:   read more »