More, below, from a person posting at
Blogs at the Center for Internet and Society, cyberlaw.stanford:
Protection of anonymous speech online extended to Bloggers
The NYT reports that a Delaware Supreme Court has ruled that a public official who claims to have been defamed by an anonymous blogger cannot use a subpoena to unmask the blogger’s identity unless he has “substantial evidence” to prove his claim.
This is the correct decision. I was involved in some of the first cases challenging the use of subpoenas to learn the identity of anonymous posters on Yahoo message boards when I was at EFF. The problem is that in the course of normal civil litigation, courts generally do not like to get involved in the discovery process, and there is a general philosophy to disclose all information so that there are no surprises at trial. We had to convince the courts that subpoenas seeking the identity of a speaker were special, because the First Amendment protects a speaker’s right to speak anonymously. So there needed to be some burden on the party seeking the information to demonstrate that they have a valid claim before the identity of the speaker was revealed.
Here, the Delaware Supreme Court says that the burden is that the plaintiff must have “substantial evidence” to support their claim that they were defamed before the Court will allow the name of the blogger to be released. The timing is important because it prevents plaintiffs from filing bogus claims just so they can issue subpoenas to get the blogger’s name. As the Court said, this standard:
...will more appropriately protect against the chilling effect on anonymous First Amendment Internet speech that can arise when plaintiffs bring trivial defamation lawsuits primarily to harass or unmask their critics.Meanwhile, political bloggers around the world are not having such an easy time:
Political bloggers jailed, detained
Alorie Gilbert, Staff Writer,
CNET News.com via NYT
Published: November 4, 2005
Libya has sentenced a blogger to a year and a half in prison after he criticized the government in his online articles, according to Human Rights Watch.
The jailing, which the rights group reported Thursday, is one of several recent crackdowns on bloggers by authoritarian governments. The group also confirmed Friday that Egyptian authorities have detained a university student who had criticized the government and Islamic fundamentalism in his blog in what may be the first such case in the country.
Meanwhile,
free press advocate Reporters Without Borders is calling on China to reopen a blog it shut down recently. The pro-democracy blog was nominated for a free speech award in Germany just days before its closure, the Paris-based organization said.
In the Libya case, a court in Tripoli convicted blogger Abd al-Raziq al-Mansuri, 52, on charges of illegal handgun possession earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said. But al-Mansuri and his family, which has denounced his arrest and sentence, say it's an attempt to silence dissent.
"The gun charges are a ruse," Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "The authorities went after al-Mansuri because they did not like what he wrote."
The arrest came after al-Mansuri published some 50 articles on the U.K.-based Web site akhbar-libya.com, in which he criticized Libyan society and government. The arrest was carried out by the Internal Security Agency, who confiscated his computer, papers and compact discs and questioned him about his articles, he told Human Rights Watch. In a search of al-Mansuri's home the next day, agents found an old pistol belonging to his father, the rights group said.
The family said Libyan authorities asked them to proclaim that al-Mansuri is deranged. Human Rights Watch said the Libyan government has not responded to requests for more information about the case...