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Court Protects Anonymous Posters Identity
Lisa Krinsky, a former executive with SFBC International filed a lawsuit against an anonymous Internet message board poster. She was attempting to subpoena Yahoo in order to extract the identity of the poster and nine others. The executive accused the posters of libel and fraud and other claims because the anonymous persons made “scathing verbal attacks” against Ms. Krinsky while she was a company executive. The trial court granted Ms. Krinsky the right to subpoena Yahoo in order to reveal the identity of the poster(s).
A California appeals court has ruled that the anonymous Internet poster does not have to reveal his or her identity because although the remarks made on the Internet message board were “offensive and demeaning”, they could not be considered assertions of fact and therefore they did not meet the criteria for defamation because without a cause of action Ms. Krinsky could not overcome the poster’s first amendment right to speak anonymously.
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