Illinois Supreme Court: Comcast Must Identify Anonymous Internet Commenter

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 20, 2015 @09:16PM from the won't-somebody-think-of-the-anonymous-cowards dept.

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."

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Re: Why does the world need to be so complex by Anonymous Coward · 2015-06-21 01:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

There is nothing that an anonymous person can say about someone that I will take seriously without evidence. So, if an anonymous person says that candidate X is a pedophile, but offers no evidence, I will take it as the ranting of a liar, and candidate X has not been harmed in any way, beyond registering as a person who has angered some random anonymous coward. On the other hand, if candidate X takes it upon himself to waste the court's time with crap which endangers the anonymity of legitimately fearful critics of policy everywhere, I suddenly believe candidate X is an ass, unelectable, and possibly even a pedophile.