http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...tacks.html?rel
Testing the limits of forum bashing: two law students sue over personal
attacks
By Jacqui Cheng | Published: June 18, 2007 - 11:31PM CT
Two law school students filed a lawsuit against the administrator of a web
site and 28 of the site's users last week for psychological and economic
injury. The two plaintiffs, anonymously listed as Doe I and Doe II, are
female students at Yale Law School and claim that the users of a third-party
law school message board have consistently and regularly made such
disparaging remarks about their characters that it has cost them not only
their emotional wellbeing, but internships and jobs. And despite repeated
requests to remove the offensive posts, the site's administrators
continually refused to do so.
The posts occurred on AutoAdmit, a site that describes itself as the world's
"most prestigious" college discussion board and claims to help students with
law school information, hiring practices at law firms, and more. The
comments against Doe I and II started as far back as 2005 when a poster from
Doe I's undergrad university, Stanford, started a thread warning everyone at
Yale Law School to "watch out" for her in a thread titled "Stupid Bitch to
Attend Yale Law." Thus begun the string of public character assassinations,
rumors, and (repeated) rape threats. Various users on the site also posted
what she claims to be false information about her LSAT score, accused her of
participating in a lesbian relationship with a Yale Law School administrator
in order to gain admission, and encouraged others to warn law firms about
her alleged illegitimacy.
Similarly in 2007, Doe II became the topic of several threads on AutoAdmit,
focusing mostly on certain body parts (complete with pictures of her ripped
from sites like Facebook) and also with repeated rape threats. Some posters
encouraged others to stalk her and take more photographs, while continuing
to encourage various lewd acts.
The complaint:
In the complaint as seen by Ars Technica, Doe I and II claim to have lost
sleep, fallen behind on schoolwork, suffered strained personal relationships
with their families, and were forced to attend therapy as a result of the
postings on AutoAdmit. Additionally, Doe I claims to have lost job
prospects. She says that at some point, she applied for 16 different
on-campus interviews at Yale, which resulted in a mere four callbacks and
zero offers. "On information and belief, it is unprecedented for a
second-year law student from Yale to participate in so many interviews
without obtaining a single summer associate offer," the complaint reads. Her
academic qualifications were similar to that of other classmates who had
received offers, the complaint says.
The suit names the online pseudonyms of 28 anonymous posters on AutoAdmit in
hopes of using subpoenas to identify them in real life. The two women are
also suing site administrator Anthony Ciolli, who they say knowingly allowed
and profited from these posts staying on the site despite AutoAdmit's "no
outing" policy-a policy that states that posts that contain real-life
information about other users will be deleted immediately. The women are
also concerned that the posts on AutoAdmit are showing up in Google results
when users perform queries on their names. The complaint itself mentions
that several posters on AutoAdmit have attempted to "googlebomb" the women's
names with defamatory comments, and that the first several Google hits for
one of the women's names do in fact point to threads from AutoAdmit about
them.
Fallout? What fallout?
Targeting Ciolli may prove difficult, however, partly because he did not
author the posts himself. Ciolli may also be protected by laws stating that
a site's administrators aren't responsible for the posts made by its users,
such as the DMCA's Safe Harbor for copyrighted content. In March, Ciolli
also told the Washington Post that his co-administrator, Jarret Cohen, was
solely responsible for approving or deleting comments and that he had no
authority to do so. As an interesting tidbit of side trivia, Ciolli-a law
graduate himself-recently had an offer from a Boston law firm rescinded over
his involvement with and the content on AutoAdmit, according to the Wall
Street Journal.
Discovering the identities of the 28 posters could be difficult as well,
since AutoAdmit apparently does not retain IP addresses for its users and
does not require them to register with real names, according to the
Washington Post-just valid e-mail addresses. However, those e-mail addresses
could still eventually give away the identities of the posters involved, as
it's probable that the e-mail service providers have more personal
information stored about their users than AutoAdmit does and could be forced
to give it up through subpoenas.
Ciolli and the AutoAdmit gang may not exactly have precedent on their side
either. A student blogger from UC Berkeley recently lost a defamation case
brought against him by journalist Lee Kaplan last week. The student, Yaman
Salahi, had set up a blog called Lee Kaplan Watch in which Salahi cited
articles written by Kaplan and publicly disputed various claims. Kaplan sued
Salahi for business interference and libel, which Salahi lost in small
claims court not once, but twice. On his blog, Salahi argues that because he
was sued in small claims court and not a "real" court, he was unable to take
advantage of California's anti-SLAPP-Strategic Lawsuits Against Public
Participation-protections. "I have absolutely no doubt that had this lawsuit
been filed in a real court, I would have won," Salahi wrote.
Doe I and II are asking for punitive damages in the amount of $245,000 as
well as unspecified actual and special damages. The complaint also requests
that the threads be permanently removed from AutoAdmit and that the
administrators authorize Google to permanently remove cached versions of the
threads.
Some experts believe that this case will go a long way towards testing the
legal limits of anonymous Internet postings. University of Texas law
professor Brian Leiter told Reuters that "the most vile posters on that
board are two subpoenas away from being outed," which he says led to "much
amusement" by AutoAdmit posters. "But they are about to find out that this
is how it works," he added ominously.
---------------------------------------
Charter For This Group? 
Linear Mode
