Patent Law

Lemley to out further commenters in Yale/AutoAdmit defamation matter?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Several more of those commenters have also been unmasked, but the plaintiffs are trying to negotiate an out-of-court settlement, said Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor who is representing the two Yale students. If those talks fail, those commenters, too, will be outed, he said.

One thinks also of the mess with the once-anonymous "patent troll tracker," who turned out to be a Cisco employee operating under the knowledge of Mallun Yen, head of intellectual property at Cisco, although not a registered patent attorney. In that case, there was a veiled death threat on the blog related to attorney Niro. Joseph Hosteny (of Niro's law firm) discussed a lot of this in Intellectual Property Today.

Of the AutoAdmit matter, the Yale Daily also noted:

Speech that is purely pejorative, no matter how offensive, cannot be libelous, Volokh said. Defamatory speech has to present some kind of false allegation, he said. Query: Did Joe Biden defame himself by adopting false facts about himself in copying the Kinnock speech?

Full post as published by IPBiz on September 04, 2008 (boomark / email).