Anonymity Blog Watch: Patent Troll Tracker
As I understand it, the First Amendment will protect a person’s right to communicate anonymously unless the said communication makes a false claim that may harm the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government or nation. Doing so is called defamation (a.k.a. vilification, slander, or libel) and you can be sued for that. So being anonymous will not protect you from the long arm of the law. In turn, this means that you have the right to anonymously write true statements, or statements that are made in good faith and reasonable belief to be true.
Unfortunately, anonymity on the internet almost always requires a certain trust in those that know who you are, such as your web host provider or any of your friends that know your secret identity.
This week, there’s an interesting story developing about a lawyer named Raymond Niro who has offered a $10,000 reward for the identity of the Troll Tracker who has criticized Mr. Niro’s aggressive enforcement of patents on his blog. Mr. Niro figures he deserves to know who this blogger is and argues that the Troll Tracker could be associated with the patent infringers that he is currently going after (so what?). But you have to love it, the Troll Tracker’s response is that for $50,000 he’ll identify himself. It seems to me that the publicity is in the Troll Tracker’s favour.
More on anonymity and the law..
Wow, you got to love it, a $10K bounty has sky-rocketed the traffic on the Troll Tracker’s site. I think Mr. Niro is in fact the Troll Tracker!