Hospital Wants Critical Blogger's Anonymity Ended

rs232 sent in a link to this story about one's right to privacy, which opens: "An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490, where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a critical anonymous blogger is testing the bounds of Internet privacy, First Amendment freedom of speech and whistle-blower rights."

Comments

Libel

[FST]

If he's spewing false information, then libel is libel. He can and should be punished. Just because he's on the intarwebz doesn't mean he has immunity.

On the other hand, if he's telling the truth, the hospital has no case.

I don't see what the big deal is.

Re:Libel

[Rich0]

The issue is that many plaintiffs file a John Doe lawsuit against somebody, get their identity, and then drop the lawsuit and pursue other means of retribution.

For example, a company suspects that a bloger saying bad but true things about the company is an employee. They know that they can't legally do anything about it - a trial will uncover the facts and show that the statements are true and thus not libel. However, they file a suit anyway to find out who the employee is. Then they drop the suit (since they'd lose it anyway). At this point that employee starts having performance problems, gets lousy assignments, and generally suffers until they quit - but of course nothing is attributed to the blog and nothing is done that would give the employee grounds to sue. Other employees of course get the message and learn not to post bad things about the company on the blog, which is what the company set out to accomplish in the first place.

That's the problem with these sorts of lawsuits - they aren't about using the courts to obtain justice - they're about using the courts as a tool to remove the shield of anonymity used by weak people confronting strong ones who are doing something wrong.

If the hospital were genuinely concerned about patient privacy they should go to the Feds and point out the issue and let them deal with it. The federal government would perform an investigation while protecting anonymity, and they'd be genuinely looking out for patients without an agenda of covering up hospital mistakes.

Hospital Blogging

[BoldAC]

That was one of the reasons that I would previously let doctors post anonymously on carotids.com. Medical systems are huge, reputation-based systems. If a hospital doesn't have a good community name, people will take their personal business elsewhere. So hospitals will sue and sue to protect their reps.

Carotids has not thrived even with anonymous postings because docs are still scared. I still get frequent contacts with people considering posting... however, most never pull the trigger.

Sad.

Re:All true but so what

[Rich0]

Whistleblowers serve the public interest. They should be encouraged to speak up and shielded in any way which is just.

If somebody says something libelous (anonymous or otherwise) I'm fine with the courts having power to punish them. However, people should be subject to the courts and not the other way around - the courts don't exist simply to help you silence your critics.

Judges should be able to evaluate the merits and facts of a case, and choose to not grant discovery of an identity in cases where there are not sufficient grounds to win a lawsuit. It wouldn't be hard to do - if a blog is libelous then the company should be able to show that it is factually incorrect and caused harm. Neither of these require disclosure of the blogers identity.