Masked Email Activist Can Stay Anonymous

Mitchell writes "The NewStandard is reporting that a Texas judge ruled in favor of an anonymous political activist who used a Yahoo! email account to notify the press and to potential voters about the wasteful spending practices of Texas politician Jimmy Cokinos. Cokinos lost relection, and tried to nail "recall_carl01" with a defamation lawsuit, but a judge threw out the bid since the emailed critiques weren't defamatory."

Comments

Re:And in other news...

[dinivin]

Except that this incident is not about privacy. The issue of privacy never made it's way before the judge.

Re:Clarification -Rule of Law

[saskboy]

That's not actually the case in law. In practice, there is a lot more leeway as far as satire, of famous people. However, if you are Oprah, and say you're not going to eat Uncle Tex's cattle because they are diseased, when they are in fact not diseased, then she'd have been successfully sued for slander. If Uncle Tex had said Oprah is a pedophile and that's why she doesn't eat veal, well I'd think she'd successfully sue back.

The Rules of Law, no one [not even Oprah, or Bush] are above the law.

Re:Hopefully

[mforbes]

I realize you're trying to be funny, but I can't help being pedantic (since I worked for the Shack when in my late around the time I graduated high school). It's true that they used to ask for name & address for all purchases, for marketing purposes, but the only time they asked for ID was when the customer was writing a check. I hope these days they check ID for credit cards too, since credit card fraud is such a problem, but either way, they don't ask for the address any more on most purchases. That policy was changed a couple of years ago.