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Illinois Court Requires Newspaper Website To Identify Pseudonymous Commenter
A mid-level appellate court in Illinois ruled on Tuesday that the publisher of a local newspaper must reveal the identity of a pseudonymous Internet commenter. In Maxon v. Ottawa Publishing Co.,...
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N.C. Judge Unmasks Pseudonymous Blog Commenters
A North Carolina trial court recently ordered the editor of the local community blog Home in Henderson to turn over the names and addresses of six pseudonymous commenters who allegedly defamed former...
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Louisiana Joins Unconstitutional Cyber-Bullying Statute Club
The first rule of Unconstitutional Cyber-Bullying Statute Club is you do not talk about Unconstitutional Cyber-Bullying Statute Club. One of the problems with the law is that it does not do a great job...
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Ninth Circuit Weighs In On Internet Anonymity, Consumer Griping At Risk
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision last Monday in In re: Anonymous Online Speakers, No. 09-71265 (9th Cir. July 12, 2010), a case that could be influential for future courts deciding...
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Hey, When Did This Slope Get so Slippery? The Danger of Self-Surveillance in...
I recall a Twilight Zone episode with a great twist: a man, in order to win a bet that he could stay quiet for an entire year, has had his vocal cords severed. The idea being, it is particularly...
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At the Intersection of Anti-SLAPP and Anonymity
Consider two cases: In Colorado, clothing company Façonnable is attempting to sue an anonymous Wikipedia editor (or, possibly, more than one; the number is sort of up in the air) over some...
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ISP Gets Identity-Seeking Subpoena Vacated
From the credit-where-credit's-due department (with the requisite hat-tip to David Ardia's Twitter account): I've written previously about clothing company Façonnable's lawsuit against an anonymous...
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Live Tweeting from the ‘Restaurant of Broken Dreams’
When web developer Andy Boyle overheard a couple discussing their marital woes in a Burger King in Boston on Nov. 7, he immediately recognized the entertainment value and began tweeting a play-by-play....
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The Curious Case of the D.C. District's Anonymity Orders
Just before Christmas 2011, a federal magistrate working under D.C. District Court issued a… curious ruling. The case is Hard Drive v. Does 1-1,495, another one of these mass-joinder...
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Ron Paul Campaign Gets a Lesson on Civil Liberties
Ron Paul's presidential campaign has been having a rough go of it: He has yet to win a Republican state primary or caucus. But now his campaign's also-ran streak extends into the courtroom too, in a...
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Britain's New Libel Bill: Better on Libel Tourism, But Worse on Anonymous...
Britain's effort to reform its defamation laws and shed London's title of "libel capital of the world" has been chugging along for several years, but now it looks like it's in sight of the last stop:...
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Illinois Clumsily Enters the Nymwars
Update (Feb. 25, 2013):Computeworld reports that Rep. Silverstein has withdrawn the bill in question. Last week the great state of Illinois entered into the not-so-great business of trying to govern...
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When Comments Turn Ugly: Newspaper Websites and Anonymous Speech
Dan Kennedy has reported on an interesting anonymous speech issue brewing (or perhaps already boiled over) in the town of Cohasset, Massachusetts. It seems that the board of selectpeople of Cohasset...
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An Increase in Infringement or the Promotion of Censorship? The Growing...
In the days of unwarranted government surveillance and elaborate data collection, people increasingly rely on anonymizing services to keep their online activities private, such as proxy servers,...
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A Lesson in Metadata: Harvard Bomb Hoax
[We are delighted to run this piece by our friend and Berkman Center colleague Ryan Budish - eds.] On Monday morning, those of us who work at Harvard found our phones buzzing with activity as we were...
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