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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.