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Right to Post Anonymously Protected

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the chalk-one-up-for-the-good-guys dept.

JudTaylor writes " ZDNet has an article decribing a decision by a Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge allowing Yahoo to protect the privacy of posters to message boards. Lee Tien, an white hat attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, stated "This is a great victory for anonymous speech. I believe Judge Cabrinha's ruling will signal to other companies that judges will not permit corporate executives to abuse the courts in ferreting out their critics." Critics of Pre-Paid Legal Services had posted messages disparaging the company on Yahoo boards. Representatives of the company had no immediate comment." I'm glad to see a decision for freedome can still happen in this country.

3 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Thank God for the Federalist Papers by scruffy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The reason we see US courts so sympathetic to anonymous speech is because of the Federalist Papers which written in the late 1780s (or so) to create support for adopting the US Constitution. It turned out the anonymous authors were Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.

  2. Full disclosure on saved information by FamousLongAgo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think this brings up an important ethical question for anyone designing public forums (fora?) on the web -- if you allow anonymous postings, you must make it clear to users if you save any item of information that could lead to disclosure of their identity -- IP address, referer, username, etc.

    Until there are enough of these encouraging court cases to set an iron-clad precendent, people must be told if information about their identity is going to get stored with an 'anonymous' post.

    Of course, the truly paranoid (hello, slashdot readers!) already know to go through anonymizing services to prevent this kind of backtracing. But average users will appreciate knowing whether or not it is even possible to reconstruct their identity from saved information about an anonymous post.

    Maybe it would even be possible to sue a site that claimed full anonymity for deceptive practices if they saved an IP address, etc.

    --

    A customer service representative will be with me shortly.
  3. In other California legal news... by Guppy06 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    California's Supreme Court ruled that schools are allowed stop, question, and search students without reasonable suspicion.

    http://www.cnn.com/2001/fyi/teachers.ednews/08/14/ studentrights.ap/index.html

    Quoth the court: "Just don't abuse it too much."

    So I guess this kinda cancels out that "victory for freedom" you mentioned.