AOL Loses Privacy Appeal

robkill writes "The Virgina Supreme Court ruled against AOL in its appeal, on First Amendment grounds, to throw out a subpeona by Nam Tai Electronics seeking the identity of an anonymous AOL user who posted 'false and defamatory' messages on a message board. Details can be found in the News.com article."

Comments

Obviously IANAL

[(trb001)]

The article doesn't mention exactly where, other than in a newsgroup, the subject was saying derrogatory things about Nam Tai, but when ARE you allowed to bash a company? Slashdot is, effectively, a newsgroup...we bash MS all the time here, along with tens of other companies. When does free speech cross that (hazy, at best) line into libel?

This sounds pretty preposterous to me...free speech ought to be free, if a company's product and good name can't stand up to people criticizing it, they probably shouldn't be in business. Having said that, I'm going to go back into my utopian cave now...

--trb

Re:Dunno if this is related

[dirk]

Even in that case, where (if?) the person was making a deliberate attempt to undermine the company using false information, I still see no reason why Yahoo, AOL, or any other middle-man company should be at all obligated to get involved.

Because they are the only people who have the information. If someone commits a crime and then hides in my house, I cannot say that they aren't there, just because I don't want to be involved. they are not asking AOL to get involved directly, but to reveal information about the people who may have committed libel. If someone has broken the law (or whatever subsection of the justice system libel falls under, probably torts), you are responsible to not hide information requested by the court about them.