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Censorship Government The Courts News

Subpoena Sought For Browsed News Articles 172

Posted by kdawson from the figuring-out-that-you're-a-dog dept.
The Xoxo Reader writes "A new filing in the Autoadmit Internet defamation lawsuit (previously discussed here on two occasions) reveals how the plaintiffs' lawyers have attempted to discover the identities of the defendants, who posted under pseudonyms on a message board without IP logging. The defendants had posted links and excerpts of several Web pages that mention the plaintiffs, including a Washington Post article, a college scholarship announcement, and a federal court opinion. Now the plaintiffs are asking those Web sites for logs of everybody who accessed those articles in the hours before the allegedly defamatory content was posted. (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!) The plantiff's motion for expedited discovery includes copies of the lawyers' letters to hosting providers, ISPs, and others. It also includes replies from the recipients, many of whom point out that the lawyers' requests are technically impossible to fulfill. No matter; the plaintiffs are asking the court to issue subpoenas anyway. This thread contains a summary of the letters in the filing."
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Subpoena Sought For Browsed News Articles

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  • Cyberbullying at its worst (Score:4, Interesting)

    by the_humeister ( 922869 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:08PM (#22202676)
    And the stupid and idiotic thing is? These attacks are being perpetrated by fucking law students! Although maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. You certainly, well I don't see this amoung medical students. I thought libel was illegal?

    • Re:Cyberbullying at its worst (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Romancer ( 19668 ) <`moc.roodshtaed' `ta' `recnamor'> on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:28PM (#22202814) Journal
      And it's not even a close call issue in any grey area. it's flat out threats and slander.

      FTA:
      "According to court documents, a user on the site named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.

      The plaintiff, a respected Stanford University graduate identified only as "Doe I" in the lawsuit, learned of the Internet attack in the summer of 2005 before moving to Yale in Connecticut. The posts gradually became more menacing.

      Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said."

      Law Students? Anyone hiring these people needs to seriously check their own ethics.

      • Re:Cyberbullying at its worst (Score:5, Funny)

        by russ1337 ( 938915 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:00PM (#22202954)
        I thought this kind of behavior was a pre-requisite to work for the RIAA...

      • Re:Cyberbullying at its worst (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:14PM (#22203430) Journal
        named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her

        Hey, welcome to the internet. Somebody just today threatened to hit me with a 2x4 because I accused him of making up a definition of "science".
                 
        • Somebody just today threatened to hit me with a 2x4 because I accused him of making up a definition of "science".

          When he starts posting pics from the lumber yard near your house, I don't think you'll be thinking that it's "just the internet" anymore. That was the level these threats rose to - actual stalking of the individuals targeted.
        • Well you started it!! And I said I was going to poison you, not hit you with a 2x4. And it wasn't your 'definition' that got to me. Here is a direct transcript - we were under different nicks:

          Grif: No! Like a 'Puma'! It's a big cat, like a lion.
          Sarge: You're making that up!
          Grif: I'm telling you, it's a real animal!
          Sarge: Simmons! I want you to poison Grif's next meal!
          Simmons: Yes, Sir!
          Sarge: Look, see these two tow hooks? They look like tusks. And what kind of animal has tus

        • named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her

          Hey, welcome to the internet. Somebody just today threatened to hit me with a 2x4 because I accused him of making up a definition of "science".

          Before you go talking about how these women should toughen up and grow thicker skins, realize that not only were they threatened with battery and rape, they also had their class schedules posted, dorm numbers, even times that they went to the gym. Imagine if the anonymous person who threatened to hit you with a 2x4 also posted pictures of you through a sniper scope - be a little different, wouldn't it?

      • No that sounds perfectly normal behavior for a lawyer (or a lawyer in training).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Manchot ( 847225 )
        In case anyone's curious, I found one of the threads in question [autoadmit.com]. Whoever started it really had an axe to grind.

      • Law Students? Anyone hiring these people needs to seriously check their own ethics.

        In an interesting case of come uppance, at least one of the administrators of the board was rejected after an offer was made by a prestigious law firm. Someone let them know of the existence of the forums, they called him in for another interview, asked him about it. A day later, "We appreciate your speaking to us yesterday. Unfortunately, our discussions did not lead to any answers which satisfied us in regards to your inv

      • 'Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said."

        Hmm, I didn't know you could sodomize a woman! I thought that was strictly a male activity. Do court documents have to be as specific as to what exact orifice the guy threatened to penetrate? Highly entertaining stuff.
      • There is a saying in the law that hard cases make bad law. There are fringe cases where we want to betray our ideals to give a deserving person legal relief. For instance, we believe that evidence obtained in contravention of the Fourth Amendment should be quashed. But if the evidence was the admission of the location the body of a murdered little girl by the perpetrator, one would truly consider allowing the evidence into consideration because we don't want this guy to get away with it.

        I feel the same is t

        • For instance, we believe that evidence obtained in contravention of the Fourth Amendment should be quashed. But if the evidence was the admission of the location the body of a murdered little girl by the perpetrator, one would truly consider allowing the evidence into consideration because we don't want this guy to get away with it.

          This is something that has always confused me about American law. I've never lived in the USA, but I have lived in a few other places (Australia, several European countries),

          • The reason you hear so many references is that it is a huge legal gray area in the US, mostly becuase of the 4th amendment, but also the 5th and 6th (freedom from self-incrimination, right to counsel) and the associated court cases.

            For example, a police officer doesn't need a search warrant to seize something which is in plain sight, such as a joint of a table. But if that joint is concealed then if it were to be seized then it would be inadmissible.

            Another example is that statements made to the police

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nomadic ( 141991 )
            But obviously, if it was obtained illegally then whoever was responsible would also find themselves in the dock, in the courtroom next door.

            There are two ways to deal with illegally obtained evidence; that way and the way U.S. courts handle it, which is to exclude it. The U.S. Supreme Court compared the two and decided to go with the latter way. It's about upholding the integrity of the system as a whole.

            From Mapp v. Ohio:

            There are those who say, as did Justice (then Judge) Cardozo, that under our constitutional exclusionary doctrine "[t]he criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered." People v. Defore, 242 N. Y., at 21, 150 N. E., at 587. In some cases this will undoubtedly be the result. 9 But, as was said in Elkins, "there is another consideration - the imperative of judicial integrity." 364 U.S., at 222 . The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence. As Mr. Justice Brandeis, dissenting, said in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928): "Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. . . . If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."

            What would happen, for example, if in the aftermath of a well-publiciz

          • The problem is that, should you allow that, illegally obtained evidence encourages people to behave illegally - this undermines the whole legal system, especially with the fairly poor track record of prosecuting dirty cops. Better to let a murderer go free than condemn an innocent man.

            • Where did condemning innocent people come into it? I don't see the connection to illegally obtained evidence. I don't see why it should encourage people to behave illegally either - the only way a cop would get away with it is if they lied about how they obtained the evidence. But in that case, the exclusionary principle wouldn't even come into effect - since according to the (false) story of the cops, the evidence was legal! in other words, the exclusionary principle makes no difference as to whether

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
        4chan went to law school!?

  • Google Cache doesn't help (Score:5, Informative)

    by dereference ( 875531 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:08PM (#22202680)

    (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!)
    You're horribly misinformed if you think that will help. Any images, scripts, or other "external" content referenced from the cached HTML is still fetched from the original server by your browser. Unless it's a self-contained text-only page (as if many of those exist) your IP address is still in their logs.
    • True but it doesn't access the main document and that's what they will be searching for since it's more than likely that any external images, etc. will be shared with many other pages on that site. Due to that one could not always easily prove without doubt that someone had actually read the document in question.

      • HTTP-Referer (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dereference ( 875531 )

        Due to that one could not always easily prove without doubt that someone had actually read the document in question.
        Sure they could. If the server logs the HTTP-Referer (which is quite common) they would know exactly what you did, including which search terms you used to find their page. Of course you can take steps to hide this, but TFS implies that simply using Google Cache is sufficient, which is quite misleading.
        • If the server logs the HTTP-Referer of accessing WHAT specifically!?!? If you access Google's cache, at what point do you foresee it accessing the original page? Without that they will have to check all the images, etc. and while any access to those images might be logged with the referer, it will be much harder to prove any of this beyond a reasonable doubt since the images would be shared with other pages. Technologically speaking, you're correct; legally speaking, maybe not so much.
          • I suspect you don't fully understand how this works, forgetting the legal aspects for a moment.

            If you access Google's cache, at what point do you foresee it accessing the original page?

            Presuming use of a typical web browser in default configuration, nearly immediately. As soon as the first page specifies any image, your browser will dutifully go request that image from the original site. Note that use of text-only non-script browsers like lynx (or having the equivalent plug-ins) means your browser will refuse to load images, scripts, and so forth, so of course that avoids this issue. Further

            • I'm not confused at those steps at all. I just don't see many admins willing or even thinking to do searches for referers accessing the *images* since images are often cached by the browser, and the larger the site the more likely this will be the case. A test on one of my sites shows that a single visit to my main page followed by a viewing of a specific page through google's cache reveals that there is no log of me accessing that specific page in any regard, text or images, referer or not. So all the "pe

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by strider1551 ( 967504 )

      (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!)
      All the more reason to use Tor. There we go...

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by gaderael ( 1081429 )

        (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!)
        All the more reason to use Tor. There we go...
        All the more reason to not be a stupid jackass on the internet. There we go...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by makomk ( 752139 )
          Won't help. You also need to make sure you don't read any webpages at the same time as a stupid jackass is reading them and posting links to them in a comment that'll get them sued. (Remember, they're trying to subpoena a record of all visitors to the pages in question over a period of several hours.)

    • Not necessarily; &strip=1 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Xelios ( 822510 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:25PM (#22203116)
      Copy the cache URL, paste to address bar and add &strip=1 to the end. It will ignore anything not in the cache'd record. You won't see any images and the like, but you also won't end up in the website's logs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )
        I wish that was the default. I normally only use the cache when a server with interesting looking results is not responding. It's annoying when some script, css or image on the page stops the cache version from loading as well.

    • Re:Google Cache doesn't help (Score:4, Informative)

      by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:26PM (#22203120)
      It's worse than that. Google (cache) is a single point of failure. All it takes is a valid subpoena from a court to the company Google, and Google will divulge all the information it has about an IP or a user account etc. That may include web pages visited, search terms, emails, etc., eg your whole online life.

      From a privacy perspective, it's a lot better if the information that the lawyers are looking for is physically scattered over many websites, each owned by a separate legal entity with different hardware capabilities, different backup strategies, different technical expertise, and different political beliefs.

      Remember, the company Google has enough information already to reconstruct your email conversations (if you use gmail or you exchange emails with someone who uses gmail), your searches terms on Google and partner search engines (agreements to pass along complete search histories to Google in exchange for help with searching), and the actual pages on third party web sites that you visit (world wide text ad tracking by Google/Doubleclick is enough for browsing history reconstruction).

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by darkmeridian ( 119044 )
        The plaintiffs' law firm, Keker & Van Nest LLP, counts Google as amongst its largest customers, and there appears to be a conflict of interest at play. The Autoadmit turds created a Googlepages website with a plaintiff's pictures. The federal jurisdiction was predicated on the copyright violation on this website. Yet KVN did not issue a subpoena to Google for the owners and operators of the Googlepages site in question. Such a subpoena would have been focused and likely to yield only the "bad guys." I w
    • Google's engineers have written a special toolkit that can discriminate stupid subpoenas and discovery requests from those that have merit. Once the script determines that a given subpoena is frivolous, an automated response is sent back to the plaintiff using a standard template that combines legal terms with curse words and fills in important fields like names, dates, URLs, and docket numbers.

      You can download the toolkit from Google yourself (Apache license). Do a search for friv.ol.ous.js.

  • Proxies? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Idiot with a gun ( 1081749 )
    This is a pretty good reason to view the web through a proxy, or even Tor (if you can stand the performance hit you'll take).

  • Subpoena for non-existent materials (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cdrguru ( 88047 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:15PM (#22202726) Homepage
    The Illinois Toll Authority implemented the EZ-Pass system with a lot of fanfare about how no records were kept. They made a big point about how there were no privacy considerations for having a transponder (not RFID in the usual sense) in your car.

    An enterprising divorce attorney then took it upon himself to subpoena records from the Toll Authority, in spite of their PR campaign and very public statements to the effect that such records simply did not exist. The attorney was awarded the records and I believe it was material the divorce proceeding.

    Shortly after that, detailed records were made available in billing information to customers. I guess there wasn't any point in denying that the information existed any longer.

    Everyone can be surprised by what can be found when a court orders it to be turned over.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ScrewMaster ( 602015 )
      The Illinois Tollway Authority is a bureaucracy of the worst stripe.

      My presumption was, from the very beginning, that they were keeping such records. That's why I refused to get an I-Pass, because I don't like being tracked, just as a matter of general principle. I wasn't surprised to find out that I was right.

      As a matter of fact, adoption rates for I-Pass transponders were not what they were hoping to get (maybe a lot of other people felt the same way I do, I don't know) so about a year ago they just

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xaxa ( 988988 )
        Only double? In London, if you don't want to use the RFID public transport card (Oyster card) a journey that would cost £1.50 costs £4! And a bus ride goes from £0.90 to £2. One way they justify this is because it is much faster when everyone can just get on the bus, touching their card against a reader, rather than fiddling with cash and waiting for the driver to print a ticket. On the Underground (subway) the difference isn't so great, but there's less problems with people not
        • True ... but I have to pay six tolls a day, to and from work. That's not counting other places I go where I have to use the tollway system. It adds up.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sam1am ( 753369 )

          but there's less problems with people not putting the paper tickets in gates correctly
          Granted, the magstripe (or bar code) reader could be designed to accept the ticket in any of the four ways it fits in (like Disney's turnstiles, for example).
      • I entirely agree with your sentiment. Their fee increases also doesn't encourage a welcoming feeling for those of us traveling through Illinois to other destinations. And, avoiding toll roads is becoming a much harder thing with the recent housing boom, urban expansion and what have you.
        • It could certainly lead to more out of state drivers deciding to claim confusion and not pay at all. Most toll road authorities can't collect against the local offenders, I can imagine the out of state offenders are even harder.

          For those holding off on getting the toll tags, the license plate readers are already tracking you. There is no point, privacy is a thing of the past.

          Illinois is a state I plan to keep avoiding, but if I ever go, I would hope the toll road authorities around the country could event

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Pig Hogger ( 10379 )

      The Illinois Toll Authority
      Did anyone else parse this as "The Illinois TROLL authority"???
    • Did the person identified by the supposedly non-existent records sue the Toll Authority then?
  • who says that the people who posted anonymously even visited the site any time close to when the most was made? I mean if you really didn't like someone you'd probably know about sites like that DAYS before posting anything. Or that they posted on the same computer as the one they found the search results? find the results at a public station and post elsewhere or vice versa?

  • Google cache? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by underworld ( 135618 )
    If you surf exclusively through Google cache, I think that just makes it easier to resolve the correlation between sites. After all, at that point the logs are centralized and synchronized already.

  • Impossible? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fuzzums ( 250400 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:27PM (#22202808) Homepage
    Computers can do everything.
    And they make no mistakes too.

    Duh. We all know that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )
      It's true that computer's don't make mistakes.
      They are just really efficient at taking a blatantly silly/careless instruction from the programmer and faithfully obeying it.

      Ten.
      Million.
      Times.

      -

  • Could have saved a lot of hassle... (Score:3, Funny)

    by RepelHistory ( 1082491 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:49PM (#22202904)

    According to court documents, a user on the site named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit
    If he had just changed his name to STANFORDanonymouscoward, this would have never happened...

  • Text of some of the letters (Score:5, Informative)

    by HazelrahXo ( 1114827 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:13PM (#22203036)
    Excerpt from letter to HighBeam Research, from page 48 of the Justia link. The plaintiffs actually asked for a week's worth of access logs:

    We have reason to believe that at least one defendant used your service to post allegdly tortious content regarding out clients on AutoAdmit.com and/or to email that content to third parties. That defendant posted or sent that information on March 7, 2007 at 5:23 p.m. EST after using your service to access an article titled "Ex-World Bank Official Disappears From Trial," which is found at http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-915261.html [highbeam.com].

    We hope that, given the egregious conduct that is alleged in this case, HighBeam will disclose certain information that may allow us to determine the identities of the named defendants in this lawsuit. To that end, we request that HighBeam provide us with information that identifies the person(s) using your service to locate the above-identified article, including but not limited to first and last names, present or last known mailing addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and all logs containing the source Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses of all access to the location or file "1P2-915261.html", "915261" or other variants thereof between 12:00 a.m. EST on March 1, 2007 and 5:23 p.m. on March 7, 2007.

    Response from HighBeam, page 86:

    We spent a fair bit of time determining whether it was technically possible to comply with this request. We have determined that our system simply does not allow us to obtain the information you are seeking about the identity of a person accessing a particular story at a certain time.

    I cannot begin to explain to you the complex technical reasons for this. However, if you have a technology consultant working with you, I will be happy to put that person in touch with our CTO for a complete explanation.

    • We have determined that our system simply does not allow us to obtain the information you are seeking about the identity of a person accessing a particular story at a certain time.

      grep "/doc/1P2-915261.html" access.2007march.txt >> results_for_subpoena.txt

      Barring a typo, wouldn't something like that give them the result they are seeking? Why is it so difficult? And if it's difficult because they don't have the logs, then why is it so difficult to explain that?

      • Uhhh, the subpoena was asking for IP logs from over eight months ago. Do you keep IP logs of everyone that accesses every page on your website and keep it for over six months? Even if you do, you're in the minority, or your website generates no traffic.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by WK2 ( 1072560 )
          They claim that there is a complex technical reason that they can't comply. They claim that they can't begin to explain it. Not having the logs requested in not complex, not really technical, and not difficult to explain.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      That's about the most diplomatic - "you don't have a clue, please go away or put us in touch with somebody that does" that I have seen.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )
      if you have a technology consultant working with you, I will be happy to put that person in touch with our CTO for a complete explanation.

      P.S.
      If you do not have a technology consultant working with you, the reason we can't give you the information is because it's all tangled up in the tubes.

      -

  • Right... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Spetiam ( 671180 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:23PM (#22203092) Journal
    "All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!"

    Right...because centralizing the record-keeping of all your online activity is going to protect your privacy...

    Do you vote? We're doomed.
  • is read Shakespeare.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by budword ( 680846 )
      I'm no fan of lawyers, but FYI, Shakespeare was telling us how to construct a dictatorship. First, kill all the lawyers. Second, we don't need to kill the lawyers, when the Judges we have refuse to do their jobs. One example from the mountain. A US citizen was held without being charged for over 4 years because Bush II declared him an "enemy combatant". When basic rights supposedly guaranteed to us by the constitution mean nothing to the very people who's job it is to protect them, we don't need to kill the

      • First, kill all the lawyers. Second, we don't need to kill the lawyers, when the Judges we have refuse to do their jobs.

        I seroiusly doubt that the judges "refuse" to do their job. What I think happened instead is that the number of judges per capita has grown significantly lower and that has had the effect of lengthening the time it takes to have a case heard. I am assuming, of course, that the number of disagreements or crimes that require court access to be resolved has stayed the same per capita (or at least on the same order of magnitude per capita -- 20% rise is insignificant when you realize that the population has

  • why sites that solicit controversial posts just plain flat out don't keep log files, even momentarily (surely it's possible to configure any server to not keep any records *at all*). Granted, they could try go after the ISP, but unless the ISP is logging all connection attempts from anywhere, it's going to be a lot harder to get that information.
    • Is there a decent way to anonymize log data while still keeping it unique? You couldn't just run the IPs through MD5, because someone would just have to do the same thing to all of the 4 billion addresses and then match the hashes. Time consuming, but possible. You could salt the hashes, but they could just subpoena the salt.

      Surely people smarter than I have dealt with this?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
        you use a temporary hash of the IP in memory, which is then assigned a serial number and the serial number is written to disk, logs would not identify matching IP's from day to day, or whenever the list of IP hashes was purged, but it would identify the path users take through the site over the short term.

        another way is to require cookies to use the site and log the cookie serial number, obviously users can defeat that but both meet the need for short term tracking without creating a searchable log.

  • Time on their hands (Score:3, Insightful)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @08:15PM (#22203788) Homepage

    ...containing the source Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses of all access to the location or file "1P2-915261.html", "915261" or other variants thereof between 12:00 a.m. EST on March 1, 2007 and 5:23 p.m. on March 7, 2007.


    Even assuming that someone insanely keeps logs that long, what are the legal requirements for accurate time of day on the server (none, as far as I know)? If page entries are manually timestamped or timestamped by a javascript on the poster's machine, there's no particular reason to have an accurate clock. Was the clock on your machine accurate a year ago? How do you know? How do you prove that in this case the accesses didn't occur after the URLs were posted by people reading the posts? This isn't just one machine, but multiple machines. How do you perform a time correlation with data that has no requirement for validity?
    • Hey, the respondents should point to the highest office (aka President) and declare they followed His example in deleting 180 days of records.
      Well, if its legal for the president to do so, then it must be OK for me...
      If the judge asks them why they were so asinine, they can respond saying the judges did not nothing to prevent the president to do so, and hence by condoing a public action, the judges deemed it legal.
       
      • Hey ! Who modded my comment as Funny? I *seriously* meant that comment.
        If the legal system could standby and watch one person commit a commit, then it has no right or basis to convict another person of the same crime.
  • (title says it all)

  • (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!)


    Until they subpoena Google. Or we find out that Google secretly turns over its data already.
  • I'd never looked at Autoadmit.com. I've never seen a bigger bunch of prestige queens in my life. If these really are Yale, Stanford, and Princeton law students, then why the hell are those places as highly rated as they are? This is like /b/tards for law school.

  • well, they can (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nguy ( 1207026 ) on Monday January 28, 2008 @03:12AM (#22205792)
    "They can't hide behind anonymity while they are saying these scurrilous and menacing things," said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    Seems to me that they can, both legally and practically. Anonymous speech is protected in the US. It's unfortunate that that also permits anonymous defamation, but that's the price we pay. If it hadn't been defaming speech on a web site, people might also have spread around anonymous pamphlets or sent anonymous mail.

    Besides, even if this lawsuit were to succeed and even if they found the posters, the result will simply be that people will be more careful about anonymizing their IP addresses. For example, if you connect from Starbuck's, your name isn't linked to your IP.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RingDev ( 879105 )
      Libel is libel, whether written by a known author, or anonymously. Libel is a crime. There for, anonymous libel is a crime. So even if they had spread anonymous pamphlets or emails, it would still be libel and the perpetrator would still be criminally liable.

      Seeing as how there was a crime, how is it wrong for this girl to do what she can to find out who it was and have her day in court? She has a lead, let her follow it. If the providers don't have the logs, sucks to be her, but if they do, they should cou
  • Just another argument against IP logging in favor of privacy. If you keep logs, the courts will demand them. Heck, if you keep it in ram (TorrentSpy) the courts will try to demand them. If you're entitled to privacy on the Internet, then IP logging has to go.

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