AP: Judge: Chat room users’ identity won’t be revealed. 2TheMart wanted Bellevue-based Infospace to turn over the names of people who chatted on a site it maintained. 2TheMart wanted to prove that some of the chat room users also are members of the class-action suit against the company for alleged securities fraud, the company’s attorney Keith Bardellini said.
This is an important decision. Anonymous speech can be annoying, even outrageous, but we must protect it.
The case at hand, noted the American Civil Liberties Union, “differs from many other Internet anonymity cases because J. Doe, who used the pseudonym ‘NoGuano,’ is not a party to the case, and no allegations of liability against Doe have been made.” (The Electronic Frontier Foundation also deserves credit for taking on this case.)
There’s a further lesson. People need to understand that they should not believe anything they see from an anonymous source unless they check it out. This is plain common sense. Yet people persist in being stupid.