Ok, here’s the run down. This girl who has recently started posting to a board that I like recently came from another board where she pissed a lot of people off. This previous board claims that she was harrassing people and that the FBI is after her. They have devoted an entire forum to collecting “evidence” against her. Every email she has ever sent to them is in there. Every thing she has ever said in a chatroom when one of them was there to log it. Many of them have even AIMd her pretending to be someone else and logged the conversation to post in this forum. The funny thing is, most of the things that she has said are, “Leave me alone.” I have yet to see one thing that incriminates her in any way whatsoever.
Now here’s where I come in. The people from this previous board have invaded the board where she and I both post. They threaten her and threaten to have the board shut down, and they really annoy me. I’ve been trying to get them to leave, and leave us alone. They interpretted this as a threat, and immediately posted on their site that I was going to get people to spam their site. Now they are logging anything that I say about their site, and posting it in the forum set up for her.
This really creeps me out. I don’t want people following me around and keeping track of what I say about their site, especially when they are supposedly collecting evidence against this other girl. My question is, do I have any legal protection against this?
Well, given the recent stink about DoubleClick.com, I’d look into local stalking laws as your best way to get a cease and desist. Not that it does a lick of good against individuals. There’s no way online to keep someone from doing something online, and there’s no way of catching someone that doesn’t want to be caught bad enough.
This message board doesn’t have moderators?
I would think the administrators would be your first line of defense.
Probably your second line of defense is just to be relentlessly boring. No matter how demented these people might be, if you don’t acknowledge their presence or discuss them, they’ll probably go away eventually. Ignoring them is even easier than with schoolyard bullies (for whom the same advice applies) because their presence is completely intangible.
I’m curious as to how they followed your friend to the new message board. Your home page lists your favorite message boards and chat rooms. That’s not exactly low profile. You might make this information slightly harder to get (have people email you asking for your current favorite chat rooms, etc.). That’ll give you the chance to screen the psycho stalker element.
I assume that you’re logging your own conversations concerning this group, so that you can refute any accusations.
if what i remember is correct, and i don’t have any links to back me up…personal email is copywritten by the writer. if someone forwards a personal email from you, technically, it’s a violation of copyright.
you might want to make this known over there.
i could be wrong, however. and from what i remember, if you write email on the company’s time, on their computer, it’s the property of the company.
The American Management Association says e-mail is copyrighted. However, I doubt that means much outside of corporate e-mail, or at least e-mail having to do with commercial products or transactions.
I would normally go straight to the mods and admins. . . except that they are the ones doing it. They claim that they are collecting evidence for the FBI, but I don’t see how copying a post I made asking people not to spam another board constitutes evidence.
How sad that I have to consider that. Actually, these people were already posting to Chatway (the board I like) because they consider us “competition.” About a month ago they came in and posted nothing but spam for their site, which resulted in the admins of Chatway actually imposing a censor on the name of that site. They came back when they saw that this girl had started posting to Chatway.
Actually, I haven’t been, since all conversation were on the message boards. Do you think I should?
Hmm, maybe I should tell Christy that since they’ve been putting up all of her emails.
Christ on a cracker, Cess. I just spent upwards of thirty minutes reading different threads on the Chatway message board, and I fear my brain has turned to mush.
The e-mail copyright issue is a little blurred. I think if you send someone a message you could be considered to be granting them the right to view it and show it to others.
I would be incredibly suprised if you had any control over their keeping the message, or displaying it. You might be able to go after second generation copies, the people who make copies of the original message, because you didn’t specifically grant everyone permission to distribute.
Anyways, I think ‘fair use’ allows larger quotes of someone’s words for purposes of telling people what was said than it does for critical review, etc. As in, you would be able to quote much more of a speech or conversation without running into copyright problems than you would be able to quote from a poetry reading. It has to do with the intent of the person making the copies to some degree.
Anyways, consider anything that reaches a public forum to essentially be public domain, ditto with any email sent to someone who may be hostile. The law may not specifically state this, but your chance of suing someone for damages when they quote your email is essentially nill.
The only time you might expect copyright laws to protect your public posts would be if you were posting a creative work, especially to a board specifically for that purpose. It’d be hard for someone to log onto the chat.poetry.com message board, quote a poem, and claim that they didn’t think it was a creative work. But a cute sigline in the SDMB would be a lot harder to protect.
i, too have been looking at this virtual kid site. mind numbing.
anyway, i noticed that they’re posting messages from that other board (chatway?) on their site. if you look at the bottom of this page here, you’ll probably see somewhere,
“No material contained in this site may be republished or reposted without express written consent of the Chicago Reader, Inc., except that message board users retain the right to republish or repost their own work.”
so if that chatway site has a disclaimer like this…
quotes from email could be argued under fair use. but emails as a whole, or even a large part, would not.
Perhaps. Disclaimers saying that message boards are copyrighted by the owner of the board have never, AFAIK, been tested, and I doubt they’d hold up. Each message is already copyrighted by the writer, and anything above and beyond that would be hard to claim without a pre-existing agreement of some sort.
And as for the quoting, if the messages was to you, you’d probably be okay assuming you have been granted implicit permission to quote and repost. If the post is only partly in reference to yours you might have trouble claiming the right to repost/quote the whole thing, but the parts refering to you would probably be fair game.
As in, if not strictly legal (you wouldn’t want to try if you had a lot riding on it) they’d have trouble finding a lawyer who’d take the case, being as it’d have a terrible chance of winning and even if it did, the damages would probably be nonexistant.
I’m real sure the FBI is intensely interested in what bears all the hallmarks of being a minor spat between a bunch of teenagers.
If you’re in an ornery mood, you could drop a line to their ISP’s “abuse” address detailing exactly what they’ve been doing, provided that it’s actually improper (winnukes, for example) and not just annoying (calling you bad names). Most ISPs provide contact information on their websites.
