Slashdot Mirror
AOL Subscribers Can Be Sued in Virginia Courts
ITR writes "Another blow against the cyber-constitutional separation of 'Internet and Geography', a Virginia court rules that an AOL user in Texas can be forced to appear in a Virginia court to answer a defamation lawsuit. 'The upshot, said the judge, is that the defendant's use of the server to facilitate the alleged libel was sufficient to warrant jurisdiction under Virginia's long-arm statute -- the state law that gives courts power over out-of-state defendants.' "
Okay [flame suit on] I have an opinion on this that differs greatly from most of what I'm seeing here. This is not flamebait, but just another perspective.
/. summary), the suit accuses the defendants of no less than that very act.
One of the major problems with the Internet, and especially the people on it, is the prevailing assumption that "freedom of speech" equates to "freedom to libel and slander other people and corporate entities".
If you call someone a pedophile in print, you'd better be ready to be sued. Why should it be any different on the Internet? For those of you who didn't actually read the article (apparently a lot of you judging from the comments that seem to have opinions formed solely off of the
I think it is high time that people be held accountable for what they say online to other people. Folks say things on the Internet that they'd dare not say in print. I've been accused of a few libelous things myself and was advised to not proceed with filing suit due to the ambiguity of how the law applies to the Internet.
Americans have enjoyed the freedom of speech for many years, but have always known that the freedom of speech does NOT mean that you can say anything about anyone and get away with it. Apparently folks have forgotten that after getting their AOL accounts.
>Well, the problem itself is not new. E.g. if you,
>a Californian, kill another Californian in
>Nevada, either California or Nevada can try you
>for murder (either, but not both, though).
Actually, both could. Double jeopardy applies to multiple trials by the same soverign, and Nevada and California are separate sovergeins (the imperial pretensions of some California agencies notwithstdanding).
Caselaw has held that this permits the federal courts to try an individual after a state fails, as well, though this, IM!HO, is an incorrect application of the principle: the federal government is *not* sovereign in its own right, but relies on delegated power from the states. In these cases, the delegated power is generally from the state that has already held a trial. Hoever, these cases tend to come up when there has been either a miscarriage of justice, or a politically unpopular result, and the maxim that, "hard cases make bad law" comes into play, and the desire to punish the wrongdoer takes precedence over a bedrock legal principle.
Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need advice on this matter, see a lawyer in your own jurisdiction.
It's fairly typical for long-arm statutes to claim jurisdition as in all matters not prohibitted by the U.S. Constitution.
While I could also see the case going the other way, I don't see the publication from virginia as all that questionable. Sending an article to usenet is done by having an initial server publish to the next servers in sequence. A deliberate act of the defendant used the virginia server to publish.
OTOH, while there are no surprises in this case, I'm not sure that it's necessarily the best policy. While the overwhelming majority of the activities of today's federal government exceed its constitutional authority, I'd tentatively agree that given that substantially all of the transmission of a usenet message is interstate, that there is at least some authority from the commerce clause to address the matter.
also, It seems to me that the case could have been first removed to federal court on grounds of diversity of citizenship (unless the plea specifically asked for less damages than required for removal), then transferred to federal court in the defendant's home jurisdiction in Texas.
Thanks 1E+08.
Let me lay out the significance for everybody: This Virginia court has declared AOL, well.. rogue. They just rang the dinner bell and yelled "fresh meat!". I'm sure somebody else can phrase this better, but that's essentially what they've done, and it's a sharp departure from what most courts would do.. that is, allow other courts to excercise control in their jurisdiction.
What does this mean? Well, in short.. spammers just got a few bruises. It isn't a pancea, but it's a step in the right direction.
I'm looking forward to somebody using this new development to go after the AOL spammer-scum out there.
disclaimer: #include
--
COURT LIMITS STATE JURISDICTION ON WEB
In a decision with global implications, a three-judge appellate
panel from the California Court of Appeal for the Second District
has ruled that the state of California has no jurisdiction over a
Web site whose hosting servers are located in the state. The
ruling clarifies the issue of jurisdiction in lawsuits involving
Web sites and out-of-state companies. The court's decision
addresses a defamation suit filed by plaintiff Steven Rambam
against the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO). The JDO had
posted information on its Web site claiming that Rambam was a
racist Nazi sympathizer and a potential murderer. In his
lawsuit, Rambam claimed that the JDO's contracts with
California-based Web hosts GeoCities and Xoom.com provided the
state with jurisdiction in the case. The judges disagreed.
"Defendants' conduct of contracting, via computer, with Internet
service providers, which may be California corporations or which
may maintain offices or databases in California, is insufficient
to constitute 'purposeful availment,'" wrote judge Mildred
Lillie. (C|Net 06/09/99)
The C|net article is here. Seems to me that the case law is very unsettled. (Not that I have a clue about law!) Which makes the pending battles over UCI TA legislation all the more important and dangerous.http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/display Story.pl?/features/990531ucita_home.htm
I'm a little uneasy about this decision. First of all, this means that precedent is set for other such cases of electronic storage being at some point under the jurisdiction of the state in which servers reside. There are millions of servers out there and with routing and storage the way it is, most internet users don't have the know-how or the means to track things like usenet posts or other sorts of uploads.
It seems that suddenly we can open up a whole new world of law, where a computer crime can be tried in whatever state seems to have the laws that are most in favor of the prosecution. The entire realm of computer crimes could be slowed to a halt while courts decide where all these cases should be tried.
Finally, the second poster here had a very good point. What about other countries? What if some American libels me on a newsgroup and some usenet server in Swizerland gets ahold of it. Can I try him under Swiss Law if I live in Swizerland? What about if I'm his next door neighbor? There's a lot of issues to be sorted out with this kind of decision, and I'm not convinced that the judge in this case was internet savvy enough to think about some of the technical and community ramifications of such a judgement.
[In the U.S., federal courts may hear cases to be decided under state law if the parties are "diverse", i.e., if one party is a resident and the other parties are not (here, here, the plaintiff was a Virginia resident and the defendants were Texas residents). If you are sued in a court of a state you don't live in, and you want the case to be heard in federal court, you may "remove" the case to the federal court. The case has to meet a certain size cutoff (currently, at least $75K must be in dispute).]
The judge in this case found jurisdiction under this provision on the ground that the defendants committed an "act" in Virginia by publishing on AOL's Virginia-based server. That's pretty questionable in and of itself, but what makes it even worse is that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been held to require that nonresidents have some certain level of "minimum contacts" with a state before they may be subject to that state's jurisdiction. It certainly seems questionable whether that standard was met here.
Incidentally, if you ignore a lawsuit against you in another jurisdiction as one poster has suggested -- "default" is the technical term -- the plaintiff can generally have the judgment entered in whatever jurisdiction you keep your wealth and use it to go after your assets there. (In particular, U.S. states are required by the Constitution to give the judgments of other state courts "full faith and credit.") A court will generally only refuse to enter the judgment where it is "repugnant to public policy" of the jurisdiction; for example, U.S. courts won't enter a British judgment if the underlying claim is a libel claim which would be barred by the First Amendment in this country.
Here's the problem:
;)
Current political structures are dependant upon the concept of geographical location and borders. Laws, government, etc. only apply within a set geographic region that you call your territory.
The net transcends the concept of physical location. On the net, your 'location' becomes your IP, it's really the only valid descriptor of location on the net, and it shares no ties to real physical location.
Attempts to apply legal models centered around physical geography to something entirely outside the realm of physical geography will only produce more confusion, and more instances like this.
To take it a step further, we are now moving into the information age with an alarming pace. All societal transformations of this magnitude (the industrial revolution, for example) have taken hundreds (if not thousands) of years to occur. This one will happen primarily in a few decades. One generation.
There will be growing pains.
Some of us scream about the deterioration of "society." From the old perspective, yes, many of our tried and true institutions (ways of ordering the chaos around us) are crumbling. This is because they are no longer relevant to modern day life. They must be abandoned if real progress (wtf does that mean?) is to occur.
Open your eyes
Anthony DiMarco
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
This ruling is nothing new. It's just the straightforward application of an _existing_ legal rule relating to intentional torts committed in interstate commerce. Some years ago, a Florida publisher published defamatory statements about a California resident in a magazine distributed in interstate commerce. The Californian haled the Florida company into a California court on the defamation suit. This case goes back at least twenty years (1972, if I am not mistaken).
Nor is this the first time it's happened on the Internet. I personally know of a woman from Minnesota who was sued by someone in Alabama (in Alabama state court) over something defamatory she put on the web. She failed to appear in Alabama and lost a default judgment and is now fighting (and losing) to keep the plaintiff from executing the judgment against her in Minnesota.
This has nothing to do with "freedom of speech" or anything like that. It's not even news (except perhaps to the woefully uneducated American public that pays no attention to legal matters 98% of the time anyway). This is a well-established legal rule, the application of which in this situation is completely unsurprising.
Now, let's correct some misconceptions:
* In theory this means that anyone who libels AOL can be sued in Virginia -- even if the libellant is without the United States. There may be problems with service of process, of course.
* "Internet Culture" (assuming there was such a thing) is utterly irrelevant.
* The theorem that the law doesn't apply to the Internet is COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT.
* AOL Subscribers probably explicitly consent to jurisdiction in Virginia as part of their subscription agreement.
* Virginia is not overriding the federal courts. They're exercising long-arm jurisdiction consistent with the constitution over an intentional tort committed against a domiliciary of the state of Virginia, consistent with well-established law. Every state has a long-arm statute of some sort; most states have one identical in effect to Virginia's. The same thing would have happened if it was Netcom or Earthlink instead of AOL except we'd be talking about a California court.
The Internet is not a haven for lawlessness. It's high time you twits figured that out.