Judges, Still Not Climbing Out Of The Dark!

This ruling by an Ontario judge needs to be taken out into the light. You can be tracked down and sued, even if you are an anonymous commenter on a site! Funny what got me looking into this was an incident today when a faux commenter took over the name of a very frequent poster on this site. They were able to do this by registering their name as Wilson, with a capital W, as opposed to the real poster, wilson. This led to some confusion at first but the fake poster was quickly exposed.

What if I can monitor IP addresses of my posters and someone posts something offensive to someone reading the comments? The ruling this judge just brought down says that I must reveal the information and IP address I have for the poster, during discovery. In other words, if I understand it correctly, before any evidence has been presented that the posting was in fact offensive. This is not the HRC's that have made this ruling, it is a real judge in a real court case. Check out the details here.

An Ontario court has ordered the owners of the FreeDominion.ca to disclose all personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site. The required information includes email and IP addresses. The case arises from a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman, the anti-hate fighter, against the site and the posters. The court focused heavily on the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, which contain a strong duty of disclosure on litigants.

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According to the defendants in the case, they are unsure if they have the resources to appeal. This particular decision feels like a judge anxious to order to disclosure, despite the weight of authority that provides some measure of privacy protection for anonymous posters. Indeed, the public policy issue is characterized as "we are dealing with an anti-hate speech advocate and Defendants whose website is so controversial that it is blocked to employees of the Ontario Public Service." Leaving aside the fact that sites blocked to employees of the Ontario Public Service is not much of a threshold (Facebook is blocked to the OPS), the public policy issue is not the merits of the particular website. Rather, it is the privacy and free speech rights of the posters to that site.

And more here at Celestial Junk.

This should concern all bloggers and posters of all political stripes. You can post something on-line, and according to this ruling, the site you posted it on will be forced by law to give out your IP address. It also sounds like a site being hosted in the US will not protect you.

Now, I do have a site meter that records the last 100 IP addresses of everyone who accesses this site, but I do not keep those addresses and they are not the full IP address, so I couldn't track anyone down even if I wanted to. I would imagine that blogger.com does keep some sort of record, I'm not sure about it though. Maybe someone more computer savvy would know.

The point. No blogger or poster to a blog site is safe from an individual who's feelings have been hurt by someone who reads your comments. If that doesn't scare you, I bet you were busy listening to banned foreigner Galloway and screaming about his right to free speech, forgetting that here, in our own country, those freedoms are being taken away by HRC's and now judges!

This is an individual that didn't like comments made about him on a conservative website, and he has now taken the owners of the site to court. That is not enough for him though, he is going after anonymous posters who posted comments about him as well. The judge has ruled that those anonymous posters have no right to privacy, even though no ruling against them has yet been made by that judge. It appears that the HRC's have crept into the real courts and influenced real judges.

Don't think it couldn't happen to you because you are anonymous. It appears you have NO right to be anonymous anymore!