Since none of you know who the hell I am in real life (or on the Board because I’m mostly a lurker), any one of you can pretty much say anything you want about me (or anyone else) here in the the safety of the SDMB. It would be impossible to harm the reputaion of an “anonymous” person right? No harm, no foul [no damage, no tort]?
Also, does a high number of posts on the SDMB make one a “public figure” for purposes of defamation law? If so, how many posts makes one a public figure?
I suspect that you’re mostly right. However, there can be exceptions. Let’s try a hypothetical:
A poster to this MB is known to be an expert in a particular field, their real life identity is known, and there are others in that field (or in a field which relies upon their expertise) who know the identity of the poster.
Now, suppose in the midst of a flame war or as the result of a periodic but persistent vendetta, a second poster begins to assert that the first poster is accepting bribes for their testimony in various instances where their “impartial” expertise is expected (court cases, scientific experiments, or some similar events).
If the second poster’s words were believed by the real life associates of the first poster, causing that poster to lose income as their expertise was no longer sought as impartial or where the first poster might be accused of perjury, the first poster will certainly have the right to sue the second poster. (Winning that suit, as in all such cases, is up to the whim of the jury.)
You could accuse tomndebb of any number of acts of moral turpitude and, (other than being ignored, scorned, or flamed), you would be safe from reprisals on this message board. If your accusations led to a cross-over event in real life, affecting the ability of the person posting as tomndebb to carry on with his or her life, you could, indeed, be held accountable.
There have already been several cases of internet harrassment of one sort or another in which a person was found liable for their actions and were fined or otherwise punished.
I doubt that anonymous participation in a message board or newsgroup with any frequency would ever establish one as a public figure.
OK… the public figure thing was a joke…
<<It would be impossible to harm the reputaion of an “anonymous” person right? No harm, no foul [no damage, no tort]?>>
You’re partly there. There’s no damage because no reasonable person would believe anything posted in an online BB.
Not true in the UK, Joe. Godfrey vs Demon Internet set the legal precedent:
I don’t know how it would be applied to a non-ISP, but given that the SDMB does exercise editorial control (in deleting posts and threads occasionally) it removes the ‘innocent disseminator’ defence under UK law. The host would be liable for defamation since it is seen as having control over the material. It wasn’t a good precedent; basically, ISPs have to immediately remove contentious content on receipt of a complaint unless they want to be taken to court, regardless of the complaint’s legitimacy.
The SDMB has to take account of laws wherever it can be accessed. Solely complying with US laws won’t wash with courts elsewhere. Quite how that would work in practice, though, I don’t know.
seems to me the point isn’t whether the person DOING the defaming is anonymous… I think the point is that the person BEING defamed is anonymous. The UK case seemed to be the former, not the latter. It would be like someone saying ‘lawoot is a child molester’. and I come out and say, well my real name is ‘John Doe’… and you’ve just defamed me. Prepare to be sued!
(Hell, I think only one poster here knows my real name, and that’s my brother).
Ah … fair point. I guess it would depend if the complainant could make reasonable claim that his or her real identity was known to others here.
Keep in mind that many people in this place have met in person, in large groups, so are not by definiton, anonymous. Also, defamation is bascially that which harms the reputation of another within their community. It would be an interesting case, as some could argue that this is a community. So if you were to announce that everyone’s favorite MD in here was a quack who faked their credentials and they were subsequently ignored by the other posters, or if one person in here knows them, and spreads this info around the neighborhood, that falls under defamation. I’m not sure how far it would go in a courtroom, but a couple of decent lawyers can do just about anything. When in doubt, play nice with others.
Crusoe:
I am totally alarmed by your cite about libel. The ISP was sued for something on the Internet? I hope it is poor reporting. It seems to me that SDMB would be a better entity to sue if something was posted bad on the board. How would my ISP deal with incorrect posts on SDMB other than blocking SDMB for every body that uses the service. I hope that Mr Godfrey was trying to get at some message board that the ISP was hosting not just something on the Internet.
Godfrey was complaining about a posting to a usenet newsgroup, which may or may not have been hosted on a Demon server. I’ll have to check up next week.
Gazpacho, as I understand it, the ISP was running the MB that had the offense. When the ISP was notified that IT’S board was carrying it, it did not remove it. You couldn’t sue my ISP for something I put in here or on Yahoo, but if it was posted on it’s very own MB that it was responsible for, then yes.
Crusoe and Turbo Dog
Thanks for the responses. They seem to not be saying the same thing. usenet means something very specific to me. It is really different than a message board like the SDMB. Maybe usenet and message boards are the same thing to lots of people but I think the difference really matters for this case.
My understanding of usenet is that it is for the most part a distributed message board. My ISP will keep a local copy of the last X of the postings but will not log it forever. X might be in terms of storage space or time or whatever. If Demon takes it off their server it will only disappear from view for people who use the news server that Demon hosts and then only if they have not checked that news group between the time the post was first made and when it is deleted.
My experience with usenet news readers is that they down load new posts only. So if I asked my ISP to removed a usenet post and they complied. I would have to go to a fair amount of trouble to even find out if they removed it. I would have to some how tell my news reader to re download stuff. I have no idea if most news clients or in fact any could do this. This is totally different than how I access message boards like SDMB or slash dot. In that I reload the whole thread every time I view the thread. If SDMB deletes a post it gets deleted. If the ISP deletes a post I have already downloaded how would I know.
I wonder if these sorts of questions are brought up in court or not. I hope that news paper is reporting the case poorly not the court not understanding how the Internet works but I suspect that it is both.
It seems to me that a much better remedy for Lawrence Godfrey would be that a retraction of the libel be posted to that news group every so often for a while. Much in the way that a news paper would print a retraction. I think that I like this news paper analogy. Say you got to a local library to look at past issues of the news paper and find something that libels you. Do you ask the library to cut that article out of the paper? That only helps with that branch of the local library but not anywhere else. It would be better to have the paper publish a retraction.
Anyway long post I suspect that I will just have to file this with a long list of things that I have some understanding about being reported incorrectly.
Hogwasher, a Macintosh usenet client, does. (“Reset subscription” is a menu item in the “News” menu.)
A bit of clarification on the usenet mechanism:
Usenet is a store-and-forward system where your message is propogated to all the news servers, and a copy is usually kept on them for only a fixed interval before being “expired”. Most newsreaders will present only articles which are new to the user by default, but will allow the user to obtain anything still stored on the news server. There is nothing to stop a particular server from keeping articles forever, if it wants. Some sites, in fact, do keep things for very long times. This can be adminstered on a newsgroup by newsgroup basis, so a particular site may keep a couple special interest groups for a very long time without an undue space penalty.
Since a usenet article has been propogated to thousands of news servers, special provisions are made for removing articles. A “cancellation” message may be sent, which is actually just an article that propogates the same way as any other article and is recognized by the various servers as a request to remove the earlier article. If your newsreader is good it should allow you to cancel your own articles.
Getting rid of the article for sure is still problematical as there are so many different versions of the usenet software and some may allow site administrators to ignore cancellations. Also, anything on the usenet is subject to the vagaries of propogation through those many servers and software versions. It’s practically impossible to remove a newsgroup for instance. It’s normal operation for many administrators to configure to ignore the “remove group” messages, and only do it manually if they feel like it.
Back to the general topic:
Note that anything that has appeared on any bulletin board of any type may have been privately copied and archived by who knows who, who knows how.
Anonymity - in addition to other factors already discussed, you should note that you are allowed to surface your email in your personal profile. If you have done that, it may be that much easier to determine your real life identity. You are certainly knowledgeably publishing an identity beyond this board by doing that.
Good thread, Bearflag. 
Assuming, as the OP does, that the person who gets defamed is anonymous other than his or her messages on the board, I still think the person could make a defamation case. My guess is that the plaintiff would have to establish that the virtual-self fairly reflects the real person behind the posts. That would be to show that there’s a connection between the online reputation that’s been damages and the real person who’s suing. If the only reputation that got damaged was that of a troll, the plaintiff wouldn’t be able to show that the online defamation harmed a real person.
I think the problem really comes in at damages. If the poster is known IRL, then it’s easy to see how the defamation could cause real damage to the person’s reputation. If the defamed person really is anonymous, however, the only aspect of the reputation that’s been harmed is the online reputation. And honsetly, I don’t really think an anonymous online reputation is worth all that much in cash. So I think you could win a SDMB defamation case, but you’re not likely to recover much in the way of damages.
Based upon the posts, is seems pretty unlikely that a defamation suit would get anywhere.
It is arguable whether SDMB is a “community” and whether a poster in that “community” has a “reputauion”.
Even if the above were true, what’s the damage if a Doper is osrtacized on SDMB? Nothing.
The only way a case seems more probable is if the defamed Doper happens to know other Dopers personally and the allegedly defamatory post gets out into the Doper’s RL community causing damage. This seems pretty remote.
It appears as though the only REAL consequence of defamation on SDMB would be getting banned if the statements were egregious enough. However, there may be ways of defaming people without getting banned, such as falsely attributing statements to another Doper. How would the Mods know if the other Doper actually said what I said he said?
For example, someone could post that Bearflag70 “sent me an email that says, ‘I threw someone’s little poochie onto the freeway, and I never got caught.’” I may get ostracized on SDMB. I have never met another Doper. My email is not listed. The odds of that comment harming me in my RL community are zilch. The Mods have no way of knowing whether it’s true, so they have no reason to take action against the speaker.
In all, it seems pretty safe to “defame” Dopers on SDMB. Have fun!