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Maine Court Hears Case On E-Mail Privacy
Rev Wally writes "A case before the Maine Supreme Court could change rules regarding an ISP revealing the owner of an e-mail address. It seems that some one (known in court documents only as John Doe) sent an e-mail of an unflattering cartoon of the plaintiff, Ronald Fitch, and his wife. Doe had registered for an e-mail address using Fitch's name. Doe's lawyer is arguing that the e-mail is protected as free speech, and the the ISP cannot be forced to divulge the names of subscribers except in a criminal case. Fitch is arguing that he may be a victem of identity theft."
Wow, if this happens watch out for Bill Gates. He'll win so many lawsuits that he'll be rich!
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
[...] may be a victem of identity theft.
Only on slashdot...
Trolling is a art,
Suppose I change the "from" address in my email client's settings to the address of another person, and then use my forged email header to post to an email list or web-community to which the other person is a member. Would that count as identity theft, spoofing or something else?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
If John Doe had sent the picture as a hard copy through the postal service or worse posted this throughout Ronald Fitch's neighborhood this would be a no contest case of slander.
That he used an e-mail address that had Ronald Fitch's name in it? With the dozen gmail invites I have I could make a dozen Ronald Fitch addresses. This is not identity theft. If I used those addresses to solicit his credit card information from the credit card companies than yes that's theft.
It's just some guy being a jerk.
-Teiresias
If the Maine Supreme Court has time to hear this. I guess it's setting precedent, but this just sounds like a really stupid case.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
How many peopl share your name? How many want an e-mail address with that name in it? I wouldn't call it identity theft, even if it wasn't his name. If nothing else, the insipid idea that someone using a name identical to yours is stealing your identity is absurd. I know that my wonderfully common name has to have hundreds of others bearing my name and initials and none of them are, in fact, me. Things like SSID attempt to discern among people; names don't.
If the ISP was trying to protect the anonymity of its users, in these sense of not revealing who ObscureNetHandle@isp.com is, they might have an arguement. But that's not what's happening--the users in question aren't trying to be anonymous; they're trying to impersonate someone else. Arguing that's protected as free speech is like arguing that right of free assembly means I'm allowed to break into your house.
Since when does using the same name as someone else constitute identity theft? Maybe the cartoon was sent as Ronald Fitch the author. Or Ronald Fitch the ob-gyn specialist from Missouri. Or any one of the other hundred Ronald Fitchs showed up in my google search.
Victem? VictEm?
Do you bastards want me to write you a spell checker? Oh, I'll do it alright. A little bit of longest common substring magic, and you won't look like a herd of idiots.
Just give me the green light, and I'll make it happen. You know where to find me.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
- If Doe registered the E-Mail address ronald.fitch@isp.net then it's not identity theft, he's just being a dick.
- If Doe altered his header information to have his name appear in E-Mail clients as "Ronald Fitch" rather than "John Doe" (aka "Pulling a Burke"), then he's just a dick, and it's not Identity Theft.
- If Doe registered for an E-Mail account at an ISP and, on the forms, said his name was Ronald Fitch, then at least he can be charged with fraud - by the ISP. Identity Theft charges are up to debate.
- If John Doe not only gave Ronald Fitch's name to the ISP as his name when he signed up, but also set up billing so that Fitch was billed (or would be called if Doe failed to pay), then that would count as both fraud and, most likely, identity theft.
So, is anyone from Maine, or even better, the community where this whole disturbance is taking place on Slashdot? If so, please enlighten us.Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Electronic communications leave a trail, unlike letters and phone calls, which can be truly anonymous, Levy said. If powerful entities can sue simply to identify their critics, free speech will be chilled, he said. "That's what makes these Internet cases so scary."
Letters can be traced by the postal mark, but can still be pretty anonymous at that. Phone Calls are not anonymous at all. The phone company keeps a record of what phone calls what number, and then of course there is caller ID. I don't know where this guy got thinking that phone calls were "truly anonymous". Even phone calls from pay phones can be traced back to the origin. Even if the user on the other end cant be.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
YANAL.
The issue is whether the plaintiff can compel the ISP to reveal the name of the person who may have committed the slander.
Using your analogy, let's say that I really don't like my neighbor, so I make an unflattering flyer, go to the printer and have them make a bunch of copies of it, and then distribute them to the neighborhood.
My neighbor figures out that the printer made the copies for me. Can the neighbor compel the printer to reveal who they made the copies for?
Now, let's say that shortly after I distribute the flyers, my neighbor is killed under questionable circumstances. Can the police, with a court order, compel the printer to reveal who had the flyers made as part of a criminal investigation?
Absolutely.
The question before the court is whether, in a civil suit, the plaintiff has the right to compel a 3rd party to reveal identifying information about a civil defendent. The plaintiff is also attempting to argue that they should be able to get the information because the defendant committed a criminal act, but criminal enforcement is the pervue of the prosecutor/criminal court, not a civil suit/court.
As for whether the picture is a "no-contest case of slander" (whatever that's supposed to mean), it certainly is NOT a clear-cut case of slander. An unflattering picture is merely unflattering. In order for it to constitute slander, the picture has to depict something which is not true, AND you must prove the author of the picture should have KNOWN is not true, AND a reasonable person, based on the picture, would have to believe the picture is true (i.e. the picture isn't satire).
paintball
I'm guessing it's because as soon as his real name gets out, five hundred slashdotters are going to register gmail accounts with his name and start spamming people. ;-)
(Well, okay, that's just what I'd do. Am I the only jerk on this site???
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
You've got a lot of the facts wrong...I know them very well being from the community and knowing the people involved. First you need to know that there's been a rather bitter personal feud going on as a backgdrop here and this is not the only incident, but rather the straw that broke the camel's back. Second, you should know that this is not the only incident and that more than one person is likely involved -- this is going to get bigger. Fitch recently had to get a restraining order against another jerk who was logging onto the Internet and claiming to be him and ordering stuff/asking to be contacted/etc. So he was getting calls from Pitney Bowes about postage meters and the like. Criminal action is underway there. Third, Ron is a great guy and willing to help all his neighbors. I won't go into the details about some of the group that has been causing trouble, but the latter instance above was subject to a criminal subpoena and the current case listed here about the email, the Judge in the case, on the Record, said that clearly a crime has been committed here. So Time Warner knows who did it (and the whole community pretty much suspects who did it too) and told the Judge. The defendant obviously did not want people to know he had done such a scummy thing, on Xmas even, and has been fighting the disclosure. You imagine having all your friends sent a email showing you fat, your wife scared up and your dead dog, on Xmas eve -- under an account that has your name. Stupid idiot used Ron's dead dog's name as the password so it was easy to break into the account -- guess he should have deleted the cc list on the email huh :-) So the stupid thing about this is that the police will probably issue a criminal subpoena if this case fails -- they're already involved and this is a big case in Maine -- and so this is all just delaying the inevitable. If it is who I think it is, then the mistress he's been keeping on the island (and reportedly with whom bought multimillion dollars worth of property under an LLC, reportedly) is going to be more front page news methinks...particularly since the person I'm thinking of is the CEO of a Maine corporation. But I could be wrong...we'll find out soon enough I think. By the way, the one thing the article did not say is that Fitch was represented by one lawyer, there were like 14 on the other side, so many that I heard the Judge asked them that if this was not such a big deal, why was so much money being spent to defend against it? That's a good question, isn't it!
I am a lawyer - and while parody or satire may be a defense to copyright infringement - this does not seem to be a copyright case. It also doesn't really seem to be an "Identity theft" case - at least not a criminal one. There is, in my opinion, no identity theft here. The defendant did not defraud anyone by his masquerade. The general rule is - you can use any name you like as long as you do not use it to commit fraud. Since, most likely, the defendant simply used the plaintiff's name to obtain a free e-mail account or else paid for the account using his own money - there is no fraud on the e-mail provider. I would have to read the case to figure out what exactly the complaint is - but from the article - I can see nothing really actionable.