Intellectual Property Law

Anonymity Is Not the Best Policy.

By thomason

It’s old news that the Troll Tracker got outed, and that his employer established a new policy on employee blogging.  Now, the SCOTUS blog, which fulfills the role of quasi-official blog of the U.S. Supreme Court, has announced their policy decision to disable the “comments” section.  Seems that some work by the High Court was provoking, (egads !) “sniping” and the sort.

The era when the internet was ‘open source’ for commentary, even from anonymous commentors is passing. 

The SCOTUS blog has been so very useful for keeping up on issues pending before the Court.  But, if dialogue is disallowed among we little people, then only those few, who actually get to ’speak to’ the Court, are allowed to speak about the Court.   Is ii surprising that issues before the Supremes generate hostile, visceral, impertinent remarks?  So too, that such remarks trigger reprisal remarks?  If the Court takes away, or refuses to protect constitutional rights - dang, people get upset.

On a daily basis, I delete most all the comments that come into this blawg.  Why?  Because those are irrelevant, or are spam, or do not add to any dialogue about the topic.  The best comments are those that I reply about directly to the author, and don’t post.  My favorite comment recently received was “Your an idiot.”  I didn’t post that one either. 

Seems that SCOTUS favors a blanket prior restraint policy, instead of applying strict scrutiny and refusing to post comments that merely ’snipe.’

Full post as published by ISinIP on April 01, 2008 (boomark / email).