Internet Defamation Suit Tests Online Anonymity

The Xoxo Reader writes "Reuters reports that two women at Yale Law School have filed suit for defamation and infliction of emotional distress against an administrator and 28 anonymous posters on AutoAdmit (a.k.a. Xoxohth), a popular law student discussion site. Experts are watching to see if the suit will unmask the posters, who are identified in the complaint only by their pseudonyms. Since AutoAdmit's administrators have previously said that they do not retain IP logs of posters, identifying the defendants may test the limits of the legal system and anonymity on the Internet. So far, one method tried was to post the summons on the message board itself and ask the defendants to step forward. The controversy leading to this lawsuit was previously discussed on Slashdot."

Comments

Re:Serving the summons?

[carpe_noctem]

IANAL also, but my father is (well, an attorney, anyways), and I seem to recall that part of getting "served" is that it must be shown that you received your summons. It is fairly common to hear of stories in the legal profession of people trying to dodge getting served, and people serving said papers doing mischevious things to try to pressure their targets to comply.

Posting a summons on an internet message board would probably do a lot to get people's attention (which, IMHO, seems to be kind of the root cause of this case to begin with), but there's no legal way to prove it was read unless the defendants post in thread. Which, even then, sounds rather lame to me..