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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."
You must be new here. Convince the technologically-illiterate judge that they *do* exist, and then punish people for not providing them. Convincing technologically-illiterate judges of things that are simply not true has been going on for a while now.
The Illinois Toll Authority implemented the EZ-Pass system with a lot of fanfare about how no records were kept. They made a big point about how there were no privacy considerations for having a transponder (not RFID in the usual sense) in your car.
An enterprising divorce attorney then took it upon himself to subpoena records from the Toll Authority, in spite of their PR campaign and very public statements to the effect that such records simply did not exist. The attorney was awarded the records and I believe it was material the divorce proceeding.
Shortly after that, detailed records were made available in billing information to customers. I guess there wasn't any point in denying that the information existed any longer.
Everyone can be surprised by what can be found when a court orders it to be turned over.
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.
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.