Model Drops Lawsuit After Outing Anonymous Blogger

JumperCable writes "The NY Daily News is reporting that model Liskula Cohen, who was suing the 'Skanks of NYC' blogger for defamation, is dropping the lawsuit now that she has outed the anonymous blogger, who is a Fashion Institute of Technology student named Rosemary Port. This brings up the question of potential abuse of the legal system to 'out' anonymous authors even if there is no intention actually to pursue a case against an anonymous individual. Also, according to the article, the outed blogger intends to sue Google for $15 million because it 'breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity.' Do Web hosting services even have a fiduciary duty to protect their clients, or is this all legal bluff and bluster?" Should such anonymity-busting court rulings include a provision for penalties if the plaintiff does not follow through with legal action after outing their target?

Comments

"Does Rosemary Port think that she gave her

[circletimessquare]

identity to Google to look after for her until she grew up?"

yes, absolutely. until the end of time, forever. what is your rationale for this not to be the case?

as for your confusion about how fiduciary duty comes into play, i think the idea of earning the trust of your customers is a simple and easy concept to understand in terms of growing and maintaining a successful business, no? apparently ethics and morality mean nothing to you, only the shareholder's bottom line. in which case, you should be able to understand, in the vast reaches of business acumen, how and why the shareholder's bottom line is served by not breaching the customer's trust