In the well documented case of Vogue cover girl Liskula Cohen, the court ruling forced Google to reveal the identity of the person behind the comments that were deemed to be defamatory. Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model, was called a “psychotic, lying, whoring...skank” by the blogger. Cohen needed to know the true identity of the blogger in order to sue them for defamation.
Although Google initially refused to reveal the blogger's identity, they were eventually forced to by the court ruling of Judge Joan Madden to hand over the blogger's IP (Internet Protocol) address (an address that uniquely identifies every computer that is connected to a network, including the Internet). This led to the blogger's identity being revealed where it turned out to be an acquaintance of the model.
After the court ruling, Cohen's lawyers remarked:
"The rules for defamation on the web — for actual reality as well as virtual reality — are the same. The Internet is not a free-for-all."
In the case of Liskula Cohen, it would be difficult to condemn the court ruling. The blogger in question launched a vitriolic attack on the model under the cloak of anonymity. You couldn't write such words in a newspaper or anywhere else, so the same rules of legislation need to be enforced online too.
After receiving death threats through her website, technology blogger Kathy Sierra called for the web community to stand up against "trolling" and other forms of abusive comments. She then started a debate as to the necessity of a blogger's code of conduct to regulate the behaviour of posters and commentators online.
These two cases are pretty straight forward. Defamation and death threats should never be tolerated. The problem comes when the same anonymity that hides those who choose to defame and mete out death threats, is also used by people who may be genuinely trying to expose life inside a brutal regime for example. So the real issue is not so much with blogs that are defamatory or threatening, but with those that are simply controversial.
As an example of where the anonymity of bloggers is crucial, take the Iranian elections. Blogs and social media sites gave the public unsanitised accounts of what was really happening inside that country. Accounts that even tough nosed reporters and journalists would have had difficulty in exposing. Revealing a blogger’s true identity at the request of a government that may have something to hide would be a bitter blow to healthy protest or dissent.
In cases of defamation and death threats, any subsequent rulings to reveal the author's identity should be condoned, as they simply highlight the fact that rules that apply in the real world apply equally in the online world too.
The vast majority of bloggers should have nothing to fear from such court rulings, no matter how controversial their topic may be. The bloggers who should fear such rulings are the trolls. Hopefully though, now that it is clear that legislation that applies in the real world also applies to the online world, they may now think twice before they publish their next post.
