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Illinois Supreme Court: Comcast Must Identify Anonymous Internet Commenter
An anonymous reader writes: In 2011, an anonymous person on the internet posted a comment to the Freeport Journal Standard newspaper's website implying that a local political candidate was a pedophile. The candidate, Bill Hadley, took offense to this, and tried to get Comcast to tell him who the commenter was. Comcast refused, so Hadley took it to the courts. The Illinois Supreme Court has now ruled (PDF) that Comcast must divulge the commenter's identity. "Illinois' opinion was based in large part on a pair of earlier, lower-court decisions in the state, which held that the anonymity of someone who makes comments in response to online news stories isn't guaranteed if their opinions are potentially defamatory, according to Don Craven, an attorney for the Illinois Press Association."
On December 29, an individual using the name Fuboy posted the following comment: Hadley is a Sandusky waiting to be exposed. Check out the view he has of Empire [Elementary School in Freeport, Illinois] from his front door.
Free Speech does not equate to guaranteed anonymity.
Without anonymity, you can't have free speech.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Defamation, along with obscenity and inciting panic or violence, have never been free speech. Slander and libel are civil crimes that you can be sued for in court, and it's been that way since day one. To facilitate enforcement of defamation laws, the court has decided it's acceptable to try and de-anonymize the poster in question.
Just because the words are about a political candidate, does not make it political speech. This case is not the same as speaking unpopular political views and opinions - that WOULD be protected speech. It's the difference between supporting Nazi idealism (free speech) and accusing someone of being a Nazi (not free speech).
=Smidge=
Nope. According to Times v. Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... it is not a civil offense to make false, defamatory statements about public officials unless you do it with malice, which means that you either knew that it was false or disregarded whether it was true or false. (The Times printed false statements in the advertisement at issue in Times v. Sullivan.) Anyone running for office is a public figure.
People accuse public figures of being Nazis all the time. In the Wall Street Journal comments section, which requires people to use their full names, people accuse Obama and others of being socialists, and sometimes Communists and Nazis. One ongoing debate is over whether Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist, as J. Edgar Hoover and one recent right-wing book said he was. Davis was the unnamed mentor that Obama mentioned in his autobiography.
The rule in civil damages is no harm, no foul. That's the next hurdle. In order to get damages in court, you have to prove that the action caused you damages. John Henry Faulk won a libel suit against Aware, the blacklisting group, because they called him a Communist when he wasn't, and he lost income as a result of being blacklisted.
I haven't seen any evidence that Bill Hadley was harmed by being likened to a pedophile. Hadley is going to try to find someone who will testify that he actually believed the anonymous pedophile accusation, and did something damaging to Hadley as a result.
One of the defenses in a libel case like that would be the "political hyperbole" defense, that nobody took it seriously. That's like the parody defense in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (where Hustler published a parody of a liquor ad which quoted Falwell of saying that his first time was with his mother in the outhouse).