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Thursday, October 22, 2009
Law - More on "Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web": Students at Yale Law and Indiana University Feel Effects of Anonymous Attacks
Updating this ILB entry from Sept. 6, 2008, Edmund H. Mahony of the Hartford Connecticut Courant reports today in a lengthy story that begins:
Two former Yale University law school students have quietly settled a high-profile lawsuit they brought against about two dozen anonymous authors who the students said defamed and threatened them by posting malicious falsehoods on an Internet message board.The terms under which the suit was resolved are confidential, and lawyers representing the former students, Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, would not discuss them. Court records and lawyers who followed the litigation said attorneys for the women were able to identify eight or nine of the anonymous posters and settled with some of them.
"We settled with a handful of folks," said San Francisco attorney Ashok Ramani, whose firm, Keker & Van Nest, represented the women at no charge. "Our clients are very pleased with how the case went and I have no further comment."
The women, who have completed law school and who did not respond to telephone inquiries, sued for monetary damages in U.S. District Court in Hartford, claiming defamation by anonymous posters to AutoAdmit, an Internet discussion site frequented by law students and used as a research tool by law firm recruiters. One of the women said in the suit that false material posted on AutoAdmit cost her a legal internship.
AutoAdmit advertises itself as "The most prestigious law school discussion board in the world." Many of the postings at the center of the suit took the form of crude sexual allegations.
When the women sued in 2007, they created a stir among experts in the emerging field of Internet law. Some speculated that a suit by two accomplished Ivy League students could create pressure to change existing law in a way that could impose greater accountability on people who post material on widely read Internet sites.
Internet sites such as Google and AutoAdmit operate under different rules from those that apply to printed newspapers and to TV broadcasts.
Individuals claiming to be victimized by falsehoods or defamatory statements published or broadcast by newspapers or TV stations can sue. But Congress, hoping to encourage the exchange or ideas on the Internet, enacted law in the 1990s that characterizes websites as intermediaries and protects those that carry defamatory postings from lawsuits. Victims are left with the daunting option of trying to identify and bring suit against anonymous posters.
Much of the litigation associated with the suit by the two law students turned on their efforts to identify such posters. But the confidentiality order imposed on any settlements in the case left Internet experts unwilling to speculate on what effect the suit may have on Internet civility.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 22, 2009 02:52 PM
Posted to General Law Related