Legal aspects of Posting on Fora - split from Primetime

toxic avenger wrote:

ibis wrote:

toxic avenger wrote:

The site's based in America lads, the site owner can't be sued, but individual posters can, so Mr. Cochrane is safe. It all changed when Mr. Ahern's lawyers went after myself and five other posters last March.

He didn't really change anything, toxic. The site is still owned by DC, who is based in Ireland. It's an obviously Irish site, with mostly Irish posters. All that he achieved was to make it less likely that the ISP would shut the site down on receipt of a solicitor's letter, because the US hosting company can't be sued. DC can be, though, just as if he printed a libellous pamphlet in the US and distributed it here - the libel would be available in Ireland, and DC would be the publisher of it under Irish rules.

Fair enough, it's not cut and dried, he could still be sued. But certain posters here seem to be under the impression that they could not be sued as individuals responsible for their own posts. That is also a mistaken impression...

Quite true.

Quote :

Fair enough, it's not cut and dried, he could still be sued. But certain posters here seem to be under the impression that they could not be sued as individuals responsible for their own posts. That is also a mistaken impression...

The impression I have is that you couldn't sue the poster, without also suing the web site, now could you?

I wonder if DC got any letters yet, he's not telling us about?

The Interweb is still a funny old place though, where just about anything can happen. This quote is relevant to anyone who goes to war on the web, from even a practical, if not a legal point of view:

Quote :

\"Electroverse:\"

Imagine, now: self-directing code in a worldwide habitat of hyperlinked data. That is our model network. This electroverse is a concatenation of endlessly looping data and symbols that do nothing ultimately but refer to themselves and to combinations of themselves. Here, the physical and natural worlds are leveled, electrocuted, no more than a series of signs and symbols.

This is the nebulotic data soup. It is an unrestrained, frenzied hyperbole of text, sound and graphics, each moment a cut and paste morphed version of others, an endless processing and transmission of the bitstream. Memory is a looping self- replicating tape: there is no past, or an infinity of pasts.

Here we have the infinite geography of the electronic cosmos operating at lightspeed: communication so fast and transparent that the elements, the actors, the agents of communication are swept up into the transmission stream and loose all identity but for their existence as transmission agents, each a repeating station, each no more than input and output; each one a copper wire linked into other wires, until we have a single endlessly looping strand, truly e pluribus unum. The electroverse is zero culture, inhabited by android shadow-selves who fear no law, abide no punishment, and feel no guilt.

It is in this digital soup, this is a hyper-relational environment, that we see the death of the barrier. We have no cells, we have no inside and outside, we have no public world and we have no private world. What we do have is the network and the death of dichotomy. This is fatal for the legal system, which depends for its very life on the existence of barriers- after all, that\'s what the law does: it utters the line between this and that, and punishes the transgressor.

But our android shadows cannot be punished

-Recombinant Culture: Crime In The Digital Network Curtis E.A. Karnow Landels, Ripley & Diamond Defcon II Las Vegas July 1994 Copyright (c) 1994 Curtis Karnow quoting Simpson M, \'Curtis E.A. Karnow\'s Future Codes: Essays in Advanced Computer Technology and the Law\'

Frightened Albanian wrote:

Toxic what happened in the end with you and Bertie?

Nothing, I had posted nothing that warranted the thing in the first place, nor had four of the five others. I think calmer heads prevailed in the end.

Frightened Albanian wrote:

toxic avenger wrote:

The site's based in America lads, the site owner can't be sued, but individual posters can, so Mr. Cochrane is safe. It all changed when Mr. Ahern's lawyers went after myself and five other posters last March.

I think he should seek better legal advice, he is running it from here, Declan could still sue, who hosts it?

Interesting stuff indeed. I wonder how individual posters can be identified in such a situation? The foreign ISP is not amenable to Irish law. Could DC have claimed journalistic privilege and refused to identify posters? Last time I checked in the phone book there was no-one listed as "avenger, toxic", so how did Bertie's legal eagles know where to send the solicitors letters? Did they just pm them?

I'm ex-directory, don't want the plebs knowing how to talk to me... They threatened legal action and demanded my IP address, they were sabre-rattling. I hadn't posted about their firm, only about Ahern himself, and they had no instructions from Ahern, so no case. It was a gagging writ on the site, basically. I learned not to be stupid and post to threads started by newly-hatched trolls...

toxic avenger wrote:

I'm ex-directory, don't want the plebs knowing how to talk to me... They threatened legal action and demanded my IP address, they were sabre-rattling. I hadn't posted about their firm, only about Ahern himself, and they had no instructions from Ahern, so no case. It was a gagging writ on the site, basically. I learned not to be stupid and post to threads started by newly-hatched trolls...

Legal action seems to be the last resort of the thug and the criminal. The law has finally been completely turned on its head.

IP addresses can be spooffed. If your router is using NAT and there are more than one of you in the organstion it will be har to track. As for households, while DSL usually has dynamic leased addressing, couldnt you post from a internet cafe, or from one of your FF friends house.

Respvblica wrote:

toxic avenger wrote:

I'm ex-directory, don't want the plebs knowing how to talk to me... They threatened legal action and demanded my IP address, they were sabre-rattling. I hadn't posted about their firm, only about Ahern himself, and they had no instructions from Ahern, so no case. It was a gagging writ on the site, basically. I learned not to be stupid and post to threads started by newly-hatched trolls...

Legal action seems to be the last resort of the thug and the criminal. The law has finally been completely turned on its head.

IP addresses can be spooffed. If your router is using NAT and there are more than one of you in the organstion it will be har to track. As for households, while DSL usually has dynamic leased addressing, couldnt you post from a internet cafe, or from one of your FF friends house.

I'll blame it all on the dog... No, in fairness, I've PMed more people than I care to remember advising them that what they had posted on that issue had crossed the line, and I reported a few posts because I felt it was wrong to be mouthing off at the risk of other people's money. Sticking to the established and relevant facts is more than enough ammunition, the rest is nonsense...

Anyway, back to Ganley etc...

It's not the dogs you need to worry about, it's the logs. ;-)

There is an interesting question around privacy and in what circumstance MN could be compelled to give up IP addresses? Could the publishers claim journalistic privilege or not? What is a journalist anyway? Must you be affiliated to the 'National' Union of Journalists?

There's no doubt that an Irish ISP would cough up IP addresses to the first uniform that turned up (traffic wardens included) so would using an American ISP help protect posters identities?

coc wrote:

It's not the dogs you need to worry about, it's the logs. ;-)

There is an interesting question around privacy and in what circumstance MN could be compelled to give up IP addresses? Could the publishers claim journalistic privilege or not? What is a journalist anyway? Must you be affiliated to the 'National' Union of Journalists?

There's no doubt that an Irish ISP would cough up IP addresses to the first uniform that turned up (traffic wardens included) so would using an American ISP help protect posters identities?

I don't think there is legal Privilege for journalists - only politicians, inside the Dail and less so outside it. As I recall DC said he would not hand over IP addresses. I'm not sure what happened there.

There are Data Protection issues too. Outing is a banning offence on MN, so I can't see how anyone could give out IPs - they would be banned.

The other side of this is that posters should not hide behind anonymity and attack someone's good name without solid evidence. That is also part of the Charter.

I think any authority would require a court order/ warrant to force any website or ISP to hand over details such as IP address, registrant etc.

At leats that's the impression I got from my host provider.

Ooh I can't wait to study cyber law

cactus flower wrote:

coc wrote:

It's not the dogs you need to worry about, it's the logs. ;-)

There is an interesting question around privacy and in what circumstance MN could be compelled to give up IP addresses? Could the publishers claim journalistic privilege or not? What is a journalist anyway? Must you be affiliated to the 'National' Union of Journalists?

There's no doubt that an Irish ISP would cough up IP addresses to the first uniform that turned up (traffic wardens included) so would using an American ISP help protect posters identities?

I don't think there is legal Privilege for journalists - only politicians, inside the Dail and less so outside it. As I recall DC said he would not hand over IP addresses. I'm not sure what happened there.

There are Data Protection issues too. Outing is a banning offence on MN, so I can't see how anyone could give out IPs - they would be banned.

The other side of this is that posters should not hide behind anonymity and attack someone's good name without solid evidence. That is also part of the Charter.

Journalists can have qualified privelege dependent on circumstance and the level of research they have done into the matter prior to going to print - see Reynolds v Times Newspapers Ltd and Others [1999] for the full judgement. You will probably pick it up on a Google search.

Absolute privelege extends beyond the Dáil... various other things are covered by absolute privelege, all utterances of the President, broadcast of court reports, anything said during judicial proceedings, state communications and communication between spouses are all extended absolute privelege.