Subpoena Sought For Browsed News Articles

The Xoxo Reader writes "A new filing in the Autoadmit Internet defamation lawsuit (previously discussed here on two occasions) reveals how the plaintiffs' lawyers have attempted to discover the identities of the defendants, who posted under pseudonyms on a message board without IP logging. The defendants had posted links and excerpts of several Web pages that mention the plaintiffs, including a Washington Post article, a college scholarship announcement, and a federal court opinion. Now the plaintiffs are asking those Web sites for logs of everybody who accessed those articles in the hours before the allegedly defamatory content was posted. (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!) The plantiff's motion for expedited discovery includes copies of the lawyers' letters to hosting providers, ISPs, and others. It also includes replies from the recipients, many of whom point out that the lawyers' requests are technically impossible to fulfill. No matter; the plaintiffs are asking the court to issue subpoenas anyway. This thread contains a summary of the letters in the filing."

Comments

Re:How can you subpeona

[BSAtHome]

No, no, they should want a copy of the internet, every last bit of it. That should wrap up all possible angles once and for all.

Impossible?

[Fuzzums]

Computers can do everything.
And they make no mistakes too.

Duh. We all know that.

Re:Subpoena for non-existent materials

[Anonymous Coward]

I misread that as "Illinois Troll Authority" - good to see they have to register now, should quieten things down a bit.

Could have saved a lot of hassle...

[RepelHistory]

According to court documents, a user on the site named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit

If he had just changed his name to STANFORDanonymouscoward, this would have never happened...

Re:Subpoena for non-existent materials

[Pig Hogger]

The Illinois Toll Authority

Did anyone else parse this as "The Illinois TROLL authority"???

Re:Cyberbullying at its worst

[russ1337]

I thought this kind of behavior was a pre-requisite to work for the RIAA...

Exactly!

[TheChromaticOrb]

After all things added, it should all fit on a single truck.

... or was it a series of tubes?

Re:Google Cache doesn't help

[gaderael]

(All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!)

All the more reason to use Tor. There we go... All the more reason to not be a stupid jackass on the internet. There we go...

Don't be silly

[MillionthMonkey]

Google's engineers have written a special toolkit that can discriminate stupid subpoenas and discovery requests from those that have merit. Once the script determines that a given subpoena is frivolous, an automated response is sent back to the plaintiff using a standard template that combines legal terms with curse words and fills in important fields like names, dates, URLs, and docket numbers.

You can download the toolkit from Google yourself (Apache license). Do a search for friv.ol.ous.js.

Quote the president's actions on deletion...

[freedom_india]

Hey, the respondents should point to the highest office (aka President) and declare they followed His example in deleting 180 days of records.
Well, if its legal for the president to do so, then it must be OK for me...
If the judge asks them why they were so asinine, they can respond saying the judges did not nothing to prevent the president to do so, and hence by condoing a public action, the judges deemed it legal.