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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."
records that don't exists?
Idiots!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Unless there is some sort of local rule or local law I'm not noticing that's not right at all. For parties attorneys can make requests without going to a court. But, for non-parties, which these miscellaneous ISPs would be, they need a subpoena from the court to get the info. If the holders of the info are parties then yes the attorneys could get it by just asking. Assuming the other side doesn't refuse for whatever reason they might have, then a judge would be called in to settle the fight.
If you surf exclusively through Google cache, I think that just makes it easier to resolve the correlation between sites. After all, at that point the logs are centralized and synchronized already.
And it's not even a close call issue in any grey area. it's flat out threats and slander.
FTA:
"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, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.
The plaintiff, a respected Stanford University graduate identified only as "Doe I" in the lawsuit, learned of the Internet attack in the summer of 2005 before moving to Yale in Connecticut. The posts gradually became more menacing.
Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said."
Law Students? Anyone hiring these people needs to seriously check their own ethics.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
If a judge makes an order that is impossible to comply with, it's void. If he does it with malice, he can be removed from the bench.
Just because some people decide to treat each other like dicks online doesn't mean that everyone should be easily identifiable. How would sites like Wikileaks work if everyone could be punished for rubbing someone the wrong way?
"All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!"
Right...because centralizing the record-keeping of all your online activity is going to protect your privacy...
Do you vote? We're doomed.
named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her
Hey, welcome to the internet. Somebody just today threatened to hit me with a 2x4 because I accused him of making up a definition of "science".
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, because obviously Google would never log that information into their NSA data mine.
Even assuming that someone insanely keeps logs that long, what are the legal requirements for accurate time of day on the server (none, as far as I know)? If page entries are manually timestamped or timestamped by a javascript on the poster's machine, there's no particular reason to have an accurate clock. Was the clock on your machine accurate a year ago? How do you know? How do you prove that in this case the accesses didn't occur after the URLs were posted by people reading the posts? This isn't just one machine, but multiple machines. How do you perform a time correlation with data that has no requirement for validity?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Because of your post I have incurred damages amounting to $750 (seven hundred and fifty US dollars) and am entitled to compensation. I hereby require that you post an e-mail address (you can "obfuscate" it against spam) so that we may restore equity in the matter amicably. I am open to negotiation and hope to settle the issue quickly. Thank you.
"They can't hide behind anonymity while they are saying these scurrilous and menacing things," said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Seems to me that they can, both legally and practically. Anonymous speech is protected in the US. It's unfortunate that that also permits anonymous defamation, but that's the price we pay. If it hadn't been defaming speech on a web site, people might also have spread around anonymous pamphlets or sent anonymous mail.
Besides, even if this lawsuit were to succeed and even if they found the posters, the result will simply be that people will be more careful about anonymizing their IP addresses. For example, if you connect from Starbuck's, your name isn't linked to your IP.