Indiana

The Cyberskank Case

  Cybersmear - the Skank Blogger Plans to Sue Google for $15m for Disclosing Her Identity:

Legal time-out. That strikes me as nonsensical concept: the fiduciary relationship is the highest, most stringent duty one can have to another, typically the directors duty to shareholders, or a trustee?s duty to beneficiaries. To create such a relationship between a company and someone who creates a free blogging account makes a mockery of the relationship. And what is the duty to protect anonymity? That is definitely not listed in the treatises? lists of fiduciary duties. What is listed is the duty not to profit from one?s position as the fiduciary. The idea that Google has undertaken a fiduciary relationship with users - and that the duty includes disobeying a court order - is laughable. Now back to our catfight?

This seemingly trivial yet voyeuristic spat is in fact a major First Amendment case in the making, the lawyer thinks.

I?m ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court. Our Founding Fathers wrote ?The Federalist Papers? under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn?t that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?

I think Maureen Dowd does a droll destruction of this argument in her Stung by the Perfect Sting:

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody?s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, ?It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.?

But on the Internet, it?s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

 For background on the case, here is JUDGE ORDERS 'SKANKS IN NYC' BLOGGER TO REVEAL IDENTITY TO LISKULA COHEN.

Cohen's lawyer, Steven Wagner, said he hopes the decision sends a message to bloggers, Twitterers, and whoever else would use the anonymity of the Internet for cowardly defamations.

"The rules for defamation on the Web -- for actual reality as well as virtual reality -- are the same," Wagner said. "The Internet is not a free-for-all."

But the lawyer for the anonymous blogger warned that the real free-for-all will happen in the court system if everyone who's ever suffered an ugly insult online decides to take their complaint before a judge.

"The floodgates would be opened if you tried to regulate these very broad, common insults and invective on the Internet," said Anne Salisbury.

"You can be really, really mean to people -- you just can't lie about a set of facts that are provable as lies, and that you knew or recklessly disregarded the truth of."

Full post as published by Indiana Civil & Business Lawyer on August 27, 2009 (boomark / email).