Law & Business | Professor Bainbridge

Big Win for Bloggers in Delaware

The Delaware Supreme Court is best known for being the leader in state corporation law. Recently, however, the Court was given the chance to become "the first State Supreme Court to address" the issue of whether defamation plaintiffs suing an anonymous blogger was entitled to compel the blogger's ISP to disclose the blogger's identity, "particularly in the context of a case involving political criticism of a public figure."

I don't claim to be a First Amendment expert, but it looks to me like the Delaware court did a very good job in this case (Doe v. Cahill; download pdf of opinion here).

The opinion started out by demonstrating that the court "gets it":

The internet is a unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before. The advent of the internet dramatically changed the nature of public discourse by allowing more and diverse people to engage in public debate. Unlike thirty years ago, when "many citizens [were] barred from meaningful participation in public discourse by financial or status inequalities and a relatively small number of powerful speakers [could] dominate the marketplace of ideas" the internet now allows anyone with a phone line to become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the internet, speakers can bypass mainstream media to speak directly to "an audience larger and more diverse than any the Framers could have imagined."

Internet speech is often anonymous. "Many participants in cyberspace discussions employ pseudonymous identities, and, even when a speaker chooses to reveal her real name, she may still be anonymous for all practical purposes." For better or worse, then, "the audience must evaluate [a] speaker's ideas based on her words alone." ...

It is clear that speech over the internet is entitled to First Amendment protection. This protection extends to anonymous internet speech. Anonymous internet speech in blogs or chat rooms in some instances can become the modern equivalent of political pamphleteering. As the United States Supreme Court recently noted, "anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and dissent."

With this background in place, the Court turned to the question of what standard should be applied in these cases:

Before this Court is an entire spectrum of standards that could be required, ranging (in ascending order) from a good faith basis to assert a claim, to pleading sufficient facts to survive a motion to dismiss, to a showing of prima facie evidence sufficient to withstand a motion for summary judgment, and beyond that, hurdles even more stringent.

The Court noted its concern that:

... setting the standard too low will chill potential posters from exercising their First Amendment right to speak anonymously. The possibility of losing anonymity in a future lawsuit could intimidate anonymous posters into self-censoring their comments or simply not commenting at all. A defamation plaintiff, particularly a public figure, obtains a very important form of relief by unmasking the identity of his anonymous critics.

Indeed, there is reason to believe that many defamation plaintiffs bring suit merely to unmask the identities of anonymous critics. As one commentator has noted, "[t]he sudden surge in John Doe suits stems from the fact that many defamation actions are not really about money." "The goals of this new breed of libel action are largely symbolic, the primary goal being to silence John Doe and others like him." This "sue first, ask questions later" approach, coupled with a standard only minimally protective of the anonymity of defendants, will discourage debate on important issues of public concern as more and more anonymous posters censor their online statements in response to the likelihood of being unmasked.

The court finally decided that "before a defamation plaintiff can obtain the identity of an anonymous defendant through the compulsory discovery process he must support his defamation claim with facts sufficient to defeat a summary judgment motion." In other words, the plaintiff "must submit sufficient evidence to establish a prima facie case for each essential element of the claim in question" before being allowed to discover the identity of the blogger in question. In the case of public political figures, the burden of surviving a summary judgment motion in defamation cases is so stringent that public figures are highly unlikely to be able to unmask their anonymous critics.

As far as I can tell, this is a major win for bloggers and the First Amendment.

My thanks to Delaware lawyer and blogger Francis Pileggi for calling this case to my attention.

Posted on Thursday, October 06 2005 | Permalink

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