Legal News

Subpoenas Allowed in AutoAdmit Suit

By Amir Efrati

For all you AutoAdmit junkies out there, there’s a development in the lawsuit filed against 39 anonymous Web users who allegedly posted defamatory remarks about female law students on the popular, sometimes-raunchy law-school discussion board.

A federal judge in Connecticut is allowing the plaintiffs, two Yale law students, to subpoena the Internet service-providers responsible for the posters’ IP addresses in order to identify them. (Background on the saga can be found here, here, here and here.)

In a motion for expedited discovery filed last week, the plaintiffs said informal attempts to obtain the identities of the posters from their Internet service-providers, including Yale Law School; the Universities of Virginia and North Carolina; and Microsoft (owner of Hotmail), among others, had failed. They asked for expedited discovery because, they argued, some of the ISPs may have already deleted information that would help identify the posters. Yesterday’s order also allows the Yale students’ pro-bono lawyers from Keker & Van Nest to depose former and current site administrators Anthony Ciolli and Jarret Cohen, and another individual who allegedly has information, Ryan Mariner.

As Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford, once told the Law Blog: “It’s a cat and mouse game of forensics, and if people don’t go to some effort to stay anonymous, it’s frequently possible to figure out who they are.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 30, 2008 (boomark / email).