Legal News

Amended Complaint in AutoAdmit Case to Reveal Defendants? Identities

By Dan Slater

We went nearly five months with no news from the polarizing and highly controversial AutoAdmit case, in which two Yale Law students filed a lawsuit against anonymous posters on AutoAdmit, the law-school discussion board. (For the backstory, click here, here and here.)

Today, we can update the story, thanks to the Yale Daily News, which is reporting that, with the help of a subpoena issued six months ago, attorneys for two plaintiffs have succeeded in unmasking several of the 39 anonymous AutoAdmit users whom the women are suing for defamation. (One of those authors was known as “AK-47,” who, in 2007, posted that women with one of the Yale Law students’ names “should be raped” and said they were “gay lovers.”) According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Stanford’s Mark Lemley, some of those defendants will finally be named when the students file an amended complaint.

While this development does not break any new legal ground, the Yale Daily News notes, it is one of the few examples of defamation lawsuits that have successfully pierced the veil of online anonymity.

John Williams, a court-appointed lawyer who represented AK-47, whom he has never met and whose identity he does not know, told the Yale Daily News that he was disappointed by the judge’s decision to sustain the subpoena, which he said went beyond where any other court has gone. “Free speech takes another hit,” he said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 01, 2008 (boomark / email).