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Date Posted: Thursday, August 19, 07:28:37am
Author: Dave Zitzkat
Subject: Censorship On This Board

The following case,which I have mentioned before, gives my point of view on censorship.

Anyone can post anything on this board as long as they post it under their own name (Or use their initials, when I know who they are.) These posts will never be disturbed unless the content is libelous, which, frankly, I have never seen when someone signs his own name.

When someone uses a pseudonom, whether the post stays or not is at my discretion, and I do not claim to be fair. If you want to post and have it stay, sign your name. Newspapers require that, and now even UTUBE will:



Ex-Model Sues YouTube: The Beginning of the End of Anonymous Comments?Updated: 12 hours 43 minutes ago
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Carl Franzen
Contributor

AOL News Surge Desk (Aug. 18) -- YouTube is notorious for its permissive comments policy -- allowing people to post whatever vile messages they'd like under the blanket of anonymity, removing them only after moderators have had a chance to go through them. But now, one young woman is putting that "anything goes" approach to the legal test.

Carla Franklin, a former model and graduate of Columbia Business School, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday against YouTube's parent company, Google, to force it to turn over the real identities of those who posted a video of her online without her permission, as well as the author of several sexual offensive comments. Though the comments have since been taken down, you can view the video here (embedding has been disabled).

Franklin's attorney, David Fish, explained what his client hoped to accomplish by the filing to the New York Daily News: "People hide behind these shields and think they can just post anything. Hopefully, we can put a stop to this."

But that may prove much easier said than done. Though Google has turned over the identity of its anonymous users before under court order -- namely, in a 2008 case involving, coincidentally, another model by the name of Liskula Cohen, who successfully sued to expose the blogger that defamed her -- the company is generally very protective of its users' privacy.

Google resisted turning over YouTube user data to Viacom in the midst of their messy, $100 million copyright lawsuit, even when ordered to by the court. After Web users revolted against Viacom for making the demand in the first place, the latter company eventually agreed that identifying data wasn't necessary and that Google could hand over masked data and still satisfy the terms of the court order.

And earlier this year, Google created a whole new page, "Government Requests," for disclosing the specific number and originating point of requests for user information it has received from law enforcement agencies the world over. As the introduction states:

The statistics here reflect the number of law enforcement agency requests for information we receive at Google and YouTube. They don't indicate whether we complied with a request in any way. We didn't necessarily include requests that were addressed to the wrong Google company. We review each request to make sure that it complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law. We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases.

At a time when increasing numbers of governments are trying to regulate the free flow of information on the Internet, we hope this tool will shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests to censor information or obtain user data around the globe – and we welcome external debates about these issues that we grapple with internally on a daily basis.
In fact, federal legislation in the U.S. is actually quite sympathetic to companies that provide anonymous online commenting services. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 explicitly states that in order to authorize the "interception of wire, oral or electronic communications," a lengthy application must first be filed, in which several strict criteria must be met. Then the judge is not supposed to authorize such interception unless there is "probable cause" to believe that the person behind the communications has broken federal law and that there is no other way to get the person's relevant information.

In addition, as the IP Law Blog noted just a few weeks ago when evaluating the outcome of a case between two former online business associates (Anonymous Online):

Protection for anonymous speech is not new. First Amendment protection for anonymous speech was first articulated fifty years ago in Talley v. California in 1960. More recently a United States Supreme Court case in 1995, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, reminded us that the United States has had a respected tradition of anonymity in the advocacy of political causes since the birth of America. The Federalist Papers, for example, by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, some of the most famous publications in American history, were published under the pseudonym "Publius."

Today, the new medium for anonymous speech is the Internet, which, according to the Anonymous Online court, "stands on the same footing as other speech." The Ninth Circuit stated that speaking anonymously on the Internet "promotes the robust exchange of ideas and allows individuals to express themselves freely without 'fear of economic or official retaliation ... [or] concern about social ostracism.'"
However, the larger point of the blog post was a cautionary one, warning "anonymous online blog and video posters" that "if your comments are potentially harmful to a business, it's likely that a court will not be sympathetic to your First Amendment claims." And indeed, several previous, high-profile court cases directly concerning anonymous online comments have tended to rule in favor of the filers, forcing the disclosure of the anonymous posters' identities.

Still, no matter how the court rules in Franklin's case against YouTube, it won't be the first time the issue of online anonymity has been put before the courts, and it certainly won't be the last. As John Verdi, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center told Surge Desk in an exclusive interview today, "Technically speaking, whatever decision is reached, it won't be precedent setting. But it will be a harbinger of things to come."

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