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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?
Liskula Cohen is a skank and a ho. For that matter, so is Rosemary Port.
Maybe, it depends on the local laws and the TOS. But they should have such. However, this release was due to a court order.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Sorry. "Expectation of anonymity"? Where did that come from? I don't think anyone should ever expect anonymity. In fact, I am becoming more in favor of making everyone use their real name, all the time, to lessen the ridiculous-ness, the hateful content, the juvenile, spiteful posts, that we regularly see on forums. In RL, there is no anonymity. Every action has a reaction. Maybe more people need to learn that.
Odd name, is it associated with Apple somehow?
a civil manner? What ever happened to two women hashing out their differences in a wrestling ring filled with pudding instead of in the courtroom. Kids these days....
Monstar L
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_16-2009_08_22.shtml#1250896617
Seen the fall out from Lori Drew case? Cause emotional distress to a minor and your violating the law. Granted the example cited on volokh is downright not nice but some of the clauses, like four and six, are so vague as to play into any prosecutor's hands.
Lori Drew stories on /. include
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/2017217/Judge-Tentatively-Dismisses-Case-Against-Lori-Drew?art_pos=1
http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/11/30/2014248/Groklaw-Summarizes-the-Lori-Drew-Verdict?art_pos=5
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
is this all legal bluff and bluster?
No, this is all stupid bluff and bluster.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Can the outed blogger sue the model for something along the lines of SLAPP? Well, obviously you can sue for anything, but is it likely to have the suit stand up in court?
Depending on what she's blogged about in the past, one could argue that being forced out into the open has diminished her chances of seeking gainful employment compared to when no one could just google her name and find that Liskula Cohen is a psychotic skank ho ...
Liskula Cohen was the blogger, right?
You have zero expectation of privacy when standing out in the open on a city street in the US, why would one assume you have an expectation of privacy when posting on a public forum on the Internet? I understand if you take some measure to really hide (wear a mask in public, or use something like Tor on the Internet), but even then, you could only blame the service you use to protect your privacy, not the end public bulletin (or blog) I would think...
Following through after 'outing' seems a non-solution; you could still start cases you know you have a small (if any) chance of winning to 'out' someone.
My initial reaction actually was people cannot and should not expect anonymity on the internet, unless extreme measures are taken which often still do not guarantee anonymity 100%. Furthermore, it is not something people should want; if crimes are committed via internet or with assistance of it, then through proper procedures law-enforcement should be able to track culprits.
This however was not the case here, and so far I can see the only 'solution' would be to keep the identity of the accused anonymous during the trial and make it known only after a guilty verdict. This won't work, however, since often the daily life of the accused is relevant to the court proceedings; the accusing party has a right to be able to research what more the accused has been up to.
Perhaps an anonymous trial is only feasible for a small subset of charges. Don't see it happening though, this is probably just a necessary evil.
On a sidenote, if the charges are too ridiculous, any court would just dismiss the charges entirely without anyone being drawn out.
You have a right to anonymity. You forfeit it the instant you use it to commit a crime or defame someone. The problem is, people have gotten so used to being able to act with impunity that the Internet has become a thoroughly nasty place (the Arpanet was never this bad), and they think it's now their God-given right to call anybody any name they like. It about damn time these jerks were outed and made to take responsibility for their actions.
I piss off bigots.
to protect the first amendment, but suing companies for not more zealously protecting anonymity from idiot rulings is better than no protection at all. so let this retarded catfight proceed in the only way it can:
1. one dumb biatch gets a bucketload of cash from google
2. the other dumb biatch gets a career boost fom the streisand effect
as if getting on the front page of newspapers is bad for your career, no matter how lascivious. didn't paris hilton's "career" get started when video of her surfaced giving some trust fund ahole a hummer? and didja see her ass(ets)?
http://internetdefamationblog.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/liskulacohen.jpg
skank?
skankalicious!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
HOWEVER...
If she really does go through with the lawsuit, contract law will be the deciding factor here, specifically whether Google's Terms of Service promised any kind of anonymity. I expect it doesn't.
Let this be a lesson to all the bloggers out there, to post using TOR.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
People should be charged when they intentionally and knowingly abuse the system (from filing bogus charges to initiating bogus lawsuits). Yes, I know, sometimes it's hard to tell when it's bogus and when it's just a "change of heart" but, often, an intelligent person can tell the difference. These sorts of abuses to the legal system harm its integrity and waste valuable resources that could be better spent dealing with, you know, real criminals and real societal problems. Were there actual consequences to abusing the system, perhaps people would be less inclined to play these sorts of games.
60% of the readers believes, that "if you are going to write something, you should have the courage to stand by it by putting your name on it.".
Not necessarily wrong, but considering how much the US is clamouring for people in other countries to be allowed anonymous and secret access to uncensored (but not necessarily unbiased) news, I find it odd that people in the US shouldn't be allowed to express anonymous speech.
Didn't some of the founding fathers publish a series of letters highly critical of the King's government before the revolution?
Sure, they might kill him, but in a society where you can be sued into what is essentially life long indentured servitude with no means of paying off the "damages" you've done to some company by mentioning that they might not look clean to you, wouldn't you rather face death?
it is often the case that someone who wishes to whistleblow on a company dumping into an aquifer, or having proof of a bullshit reason to invade iraq, is pitting themselves against a furious entity with a lot of power. such that you want anonymity ensured in communication channels where individuals are not afraid to speak out against crimes and abuses of the public trust by the government or other powerful entities
of course, the flip side of that concept is you get this ridiculous skankfight and the legal idiocy resulting from that. but protecting skanks from identifying each other is a small price to pay considering the upside of protecting the concept of anonymity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is pretty obvious from the some of the things mentioned in the earlier article that Liskula Cohen thought the blogger was someone else (perhaps someone who has an ongoing feud with her). When she discovered that the blogger was not who she thought it was, she dropped the suit. It is even possible that her case for defamation was partly based on other behavior of the person she thought was the blogger.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I would so be laughing right now, if this was a cool scam on their part...2 friends get together and plan how to launch or boost the models presence as well as make money...she write a nasty column, the model fake sues to out the anonymous friend blogger, then she sues google for 2 million and wins, then the model because of this gets tons of free publicity, she lands a 2million contract and everybody wins, cause they get to watch the drama unfold!
You have a right to anonymity. You forfeit it the instant you use it to commit a crime or defame someone.
But, and this is the crux of this case, do you forfeit it the instant someone accuses you of defamation? Back to the case in hand, the model should be dragged back into court for contempt. This is clearly abuse of the court system to get revenge without caring about justice.
(the Arpanet was never this bad)
Speaking as one who has been on the internet since when there were fewer than 10,000 hosts connected, I'd say your memory is flawed. "Flame wars" were as bad (or even worse) then.
There is a LOT more fear about what you can get away with now, because there are a LOT more laws about whether some speech is too free. And yet the flame wars have not been reduced one iota. Here again we've given up freedom for NO improvement in our situation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Didn't some of the founding fathers publish a series of letters highly critical of the King's government before the revolution?
There is a difference -- practical and emotional, if not necessarily legal -- in speaking Truth to Power and saying that a private citizen is a whore. The Founding Fathers knew they had no chance if the King sent a squad of soldiers to their house in the middle of the night, but they were all about "settling differences like men" when it came to perceived personal insults (just ask Alexander Hamilton...)
There's no mystery here. I wouldn't be surprised that upon learning that the defendant is a student, it was decided that any chance for fiancial gain was lost and the case was dropped to save legal costs.
Do you honestly believe that you should be able to sue someone simply for calling them a skank, online or otherwise?
If so, I can't wait till you have a daughter in high school,, you will be an instant millionaire the first week, followed shortly by being bankrupt the next.
That's a nice bit of moralizing there, but "fiduciary duty" is a legal term of art and has a very specific meaning. It has nothing to do with fostering the trust of your clients. It's a specific relationship that's entered into when a professional has a certain kind of relationship with a client, or when a trustee/trustor relationship exists. A lawyer has a fiduciary duty to a client, because the client pays a retainer, which is held in a trust account until the lawyer does some actual work to earn the money, at which point it's transferred to the lawyer's account. This is just one example of course. The recognition of a fiduciary duty is a way of ensuring that professionals with specific expert knowledge, and access to the client's funds, don't take advantage of that position and simply fleece the client.
The kind of trust you're talking about is, for most corporations, essentially marketing, as your relationship with that corporation involves transactions of money for goods or services, where the exchange is completed upon payment. In the case of Blogger, it's even more extreme, since you aren't actually paying to use the service, which means that Blogger/Google owes you nothing. One could argue that being exposed to advertizing is consideration for services (and I would argue that myself), but even then, Blogger/Google is only obligated to give you what they promised in the contract. Clearly there's value in owning up to the terms of your contract, but it doesn't attach a fiduciary duty to either party.
And lastly, no contract or duty can force a party to break the law. Once the court ordered Google to turn over the information, any agreement they had with the Blogger to protect her privacy is dust in the wind. You can't contract to break the law.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Do Web hosting services even have a fiduciary duty to protect their clients, or is this all legal bluff and bluster?
If you want legal advice, why don't you go to Harvard or Yale law, bulletin board or something.
If you haven't noticed lately, our expertise lies mainly in games, which usually involves shooting people or blowing shit up. We're not to interested in the subtleties of legal discussion. If you can't shoot it or blow it the fuck up, we really don't have the patience for it.
Unless you are basically giving us a chance to call a member of the female persuasion whose twat we will never touch, a skank whore, then this article serves no purpose.
Liskula Cohen, you skank whore.
It's an interesting point, I remember in the first episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Penn Jillette said "...you'll notice more obscenity than we usually use...It's also a legal matter. If one calls people 'liars' and 'quacks' one can be sued and lose a lot of one's money...If we said it was all scams, we could also lose a lot of money. Bullshit's pretty safe."
"He is so stupid. And now back to the wall!" Moe Szyslak
This is awesome, because it doesn't involve just one skank ho, but two of them!
I think something fishy is going on here due to the amazingly high level of animosity: They are either closet lesbians who secretly want each other or they are in cahoots and scamming the legal system.
Either way, I want to see the sex tape.
The right to speak does not imply the freedom from responsibility.
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?
The answer to that question is, not no, but hell no.
It would be very destructive to make laws that require people to not drop a suit.
(The tag "what could possibly go wrong?" applies here.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
As soon as, no. You seem to be forfeiting it when someone presents the defamation to a judge and the judge determines that disclosing your identity is prudent to pursuing justice. This means that the judge actually saw the potential of defamation if not actual defamation and determined it was beyond hurt feelings to some extent.
In this model case however, the situation had some preconditions to it. The model thought the anonymous person was someone specific and had intent to sue that person. When it was determined to be just some fashion student with no money, the model stopped pursuing it because enough damage had already been done and it wouldn't be likely to recover any of the expenses. The student is going to have a hard time finding a job in the chosen field after it was found he was behind these actions. His future employers will see him as a liability. Losing a lawsuit for defimation would probaby be over board because it would pretty much lock him out of the field for any job with a potential of paying her back.
I think the model did the right thing here. Going ahead with the lawsuit and getting a 192 million dollar settlement on a student would have spiraled her career into serving coffee at RIAA executive functions. Had it been who she thought it was, she probably would have taken it further. But for now, she got as much justice as she thinks is appropriate. What she thinks is extremely important here because it was her who was defamed. She would set the terms to be made whole again in a court and unless they were ridiculous, the court would likely follow them.
Once the model found out who had made the posts, she may have decided the "you can't get blood out of a rock." That is, it wasn't worth the legal expenses to continue the action since the person responsible for the defamation didn't have sufficient resources to even pay those expenses; let alone pay any sort of punitive penalty.
Why should the model be "forced" to continue an action that won't bring her any compensation?
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
and completely morally bankrupt (in your argument here, not in general, no personal attack)
if the first amendment is not vigorously protected from idiotic legal decisions, the entire basis of the society upon which this might legal code rests begins to decay
my use of the term "fiduciary duty" is still 100% fine in this situation, since the use of term is not beholden to a purely legalistic interpretation. all businesses have, indeed, a fiduciary duty (not in legal terms) to protect and foster the trust of their clients, just as you note. that i am not using the term with 100% legality is besides the point, because there is a larger legal issue here in play that must be fought, however shoddy the ammunition
the legal code has no meaning if it corrodes the principles upon which it stands, which, in this case, it obviously does (the first amendment). despite all polemics and verbose gyrations to the contrary, despite the (supposed) legal preeminence of whomever is authoring such polemics
i respect no legal decision that obviously abridges the first amendment, and i expect no one else to either. of course, who the hell am i to declare my moral preeminence here over the decisions of those far more legally learned than myself? lots of people believe in such self-grandiosity, from al qaeda terrorists to morons who shoot abortion doctors. you would and should retort that this is a dangerous position for an obvious legal buffoon like myself to take, without a firm understanding of the subtleties involved. leave the legalities to the professionals
i would respond that normally, yes, it is not my position to speak, but when vital concepts are abridged, it is my duty to speak. the questionable opinions of legal buffoons like myself are moot as long as the legal structure and those charged with upholding the essential principles of the country actually do that job, and do it zealously. they haven't done so here
for the common people such as myself may not be legal scholars, but we're not idiots, and we will not tolerate a clear and obvious stray from a clear and obvious directive, which the ruling that compels google to divulge the identity of blogger obviously violates the spirit of the first amendment, if not the minuscule and mechanical letter of the law
most of the time those declaring their moral ascendency over legal rulings are deluded quacks. but every once in awhile, the system is in error, and the common layperson actually has it right. that is the case with the decision to divulge the blogger's identity: the legal system has failed to hold the most important principles up. and so we legal buffoons take notice, and we should take notice. the stakes are too high not too
so be careful that your fine tuned legal interpretations do not provide you cover for ignoring the most important principles in play here. not that you are doing such a thing, but someone in the system here obviously is. it effects us, and it is important to us, when the first amendment is grossly violated as is the case here. the first amendment should be important to you to
not that i am saying it isn't, but if you think that the use of the term "fiduciary duty" is incorrectly used in the fight against a completely bogus legal decision that obviously, even to a legal buffoon, goes against the first amendment, i would simply ask that you mute your objection in the name of the more important principles in play here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What exactly was the revenge that the model enacted on the blogger? Did she key her car? Boil her pet bunny? If all she did was get the blogger's name disclosed and ask the blogger to stop, that seems pretty mild and proportionate to me.
Keep in mind that for a model, one's public image quite literally is one's meal ticket. If a blogger suceeds in convincing the public that you are a bad person who should not be emulated, then you are not going to get any more work as a model, ever.
If someone was purposefully and maliciously undermining my reputation, I would probably do the same things this model did -- better that than lose my career to defend some foul-mouthed blogger's alleged right to defame me.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
John Doe subpoenas should result in the name being released to either a special master or to a "firewalled" lawyer whose only job it is is to contact the named defendant and serve him with papers. The named defendant should be given an opportunity to either quash the original subpoena after the fact or petition the court that the lawsuit will be in to be allowed to use a pseudonym.
If there is no forthcoming lawsuit, the would-be plaintiff never gets "usable" access to the defendant's information.
If this can't happen for whatever reason, the court issuing the subpoena to the ISP should issue a gag order on the plaintiff, which can be lifted after a lawsuit is actually filed. The lawsuit should be filed with the defendant's name sealed until it's determined that it's in the public interest to name the person.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Anonymity
Many people don't want the things they say online to be connected with their offline identities. They may be concerned about political or economic retribution, harassment, or even threats to their lives. Whistleblowers report news that companies and governments would prefer to suppress; human rights workers struggle against repressive governments; parents try to create a safe way for children to explore; victims of domestic violence attempt to rebuild their lives where abusers cannot follow.
Instead of using their true names to communicate, these people choose to speak using pseudonyms (assumed names) or anonymously (no name at all). For these individuals and the organizations that support them, secure anonymity is critical. It may literally save lives.
Anonymous communications have an important place in our political and social discourse. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the right to anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. A much-cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission reads:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
The tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius," and "the Federal Farmer" spoke up in rebuttal. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized rights to speak anonymously derived from the First Amendment.
The right to anonymous speech is also protected well beyond the printed page. Thus, in 2002, the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring proselytizers to register their true names with the Mayor's office before going door-to-door.
These long-standing rights to anonymity and the protections it affords are critically important for the Internet. As the Supreme Court has recognized, the Internet offers a new and powerful democratic forum in which anyone can become a "pamphleteer" or "a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been involved in the fight to protect the rights of anonymous speakers online. As one court observed, in a case handled by EFF along with the ACLU of Washington, "[T]he free exchange of ideas on the Internet is driven in large part by the ability of Internet users to communicate anonymously."
We've challenged many efforts to impede anonymous communication, both in the courts or the legislatures. We also previously provided financial support to the developers of Tor, an anonymous Internet communications system.
The great majority of court cases are settled out of court. Either the parties reach an agreement or the moving party decides not to pursue the action. The courts encourage such settlements. It hardly means that the model is "contemptuous" of the justice system. Since she is the plaintiff, she is under no obligation to continue the action and can discontinue it at any time. As it is, she had the legal expenses to file the suit, compel Google to disclose the blogger's name and probably quite a few other expenses. If the model is content to simply out the person who defamed her, she is perfectly entitled to stop at that point or at any other point of her choosing.
The blogger can sue Google (good luck with that under their terms of service) or she can sue the model if she was actually harmed in some way by the disclosure of her identity. My take is that she doesn't understand the difference between free speech and anonymous slander. The first amendment only bars the government from making laws that diminish free speech. That's quite a bit different from a court deciding that what someone says rises to the level of slander and compels that the person who slandered someone be identified. The blogger has the "right" to say what she did but she may then have to show that what she said wasn't slanderous. There is no "right" to anonymity.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Seriously, they know each other. Cohen goes after this, THEN drops the suite. BUT, Porter goes after Google. I wonder if cohen will end up with millions after this? Sounds complicated, but it makes more sense then does the actions that have occurred so far.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Any automatic penalty will be abused.
But it certainly is worth it looking into the motives and reasons. They may have just decided that they don't want to bancrupt a student. You know, some people who go to court are still human beings.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When google or whatever give you the option to click "anonymous" then they should stand behind it, or change the button to say something different.
Is staying anonymous not possible? Fine, stop lying then by saying that it is!
Hiding some fine print in the TOS is anti-consumer and otherwise a pretty shitbag thing to do. In other industries, it would not be an issue, it would be fraud. Like saying the transaction is secure/encrypted but then oopsies, it's not really and they never intended it to be?
Details, legal crap, all that scoots aside. How about some basic honesty? (do no evil)
So sue them and follow it through to a win, don't just deliberately bring a case to the point of removing their anonymity and then drop it.
What would be the point of doing that? If being able to face my accuser is all I am after, then it's a waste of my time and money to continue the lawsuit once I have attained that goal. Now if I wanted to collect damages, etc, as well, I might continue the lawsuit; but in this case the plaintiff apparently didn't care about that.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Having (unfortunately) been involved in a defamation case myself, I think it would have been an awfully interesting trial. In order to be defamation, a statement must 1) be untrue and 2) cause damage to somebody's reputation.
So what we're talking about here are the words "skank," "ho," and "psychotic." Is calling somebody a skank a statement of fact? We would need a legal definition of what a "skank" is. I figure it would take several days of legal argument just to hash out that part of it. Then, having established the legal definition of a "skank," Ms. Cohen would have to provide at least some evidence that she is not, in fact, a skank (unlike a criminal trial, civil suits are based on a preponderance of the evidence -- if Cohen does not actively defend herself, she loses). So her private sexual life will now become a matter of public record.
How about "psychotic?" Well, that's certainly something we can prove in court. We'll subject Ms. Cohen to a battery of psychological tests to determine her state of mind. That should certainly be pleasant for her.
Now, "ho" is a bit more complicated. Does it literally mean "whore," a.k.a. prostitute? We'll need to legally define this as well.
I think what happened here is that some lawyer with a brain finally clued her in about what exactly would happen in court if she pushed this through. You don't get to just stand there and say "It's not true, poo on you."