Bloggers got a legal vote in their free-speech favor on Wednesday when the Delaware Supreme Court ruled elected officials couldn’t use lawsuits to unmask anonymous bloggers unless they had fairly significant evidence.
The case, John Doe v Cahill, is the first significant case regarding bloggers and their anonymous commenters. The case overturned a lower court decision stating the lower court misjudged the burden of proof required to find an act of defamation had been committed, particularly regarding elected officials. They set the standard too low.
Patrick Cahill, a city councilman in Smyrna, Delaware, received some rather untoward comments toward Cahill. This isn’t altogether uncommon for those in political office however. When Cahill found the comments, he went to the blog publisher, Independent Newspapers and founded out the web address belonged to a Comcast customer. Comcast told the person of situation and the blogger tried to get a protective order. The lower court said no.
One traditional way of judging the types of statements is based on thoughts of a reasonable observer. The high court said essentially the statements about Cahill wouldn’t be taken as truth by most reasonable people reading the content. Such was the case because some comments afterward didn’t put much credence in the poster’s words.
This case is fairly significant for bloggers in a number of ways. While public officials traditionally have less protection against inflammatory statements, this does set a standard. The cases like SEO company Traffic Power may be different because they had already developed something of a bad reputation and the website they’re suing certainly didn’t help them. The point bloggers must worry about is their comments, regardless of merit, may leave them open to some type of legal action. Companies must also be wary too, because in many cases, they will lose their court cases and could be additionally liable for SLAPP issues.
Unfortunately, what many bloggers fail to realize in their passionate commentaries is that the spoken word and the printed word are held to different standards. What one says in a conversation while riding in the car is generally not something to worry about. A conversation with the same people over a blog is something else entirely because that information becomes a defacto form of public record. While bloggers may intend it only for specific people, the truth is, millions of people all over the world have access to a blog. That can affect businesses, reputations and lots of other factors much more than words said on the trip to Taco Bell.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
