WWW- A Pennsylvania judge ruling in a defamation case has rejected precedents from two others states and declined to apply heightened standards of First Amendment protection to anonymous speech on the Internet.
Philadelphia County Common Pleas Judge Albert W. Sheppard applied Pennsylvania's existing discovery rules in ordering the operators of two now-defunct websites to disclose who posted allegedly defamatory statements about a law firm.
"This court finds that defendants are not unreasonably burdened by this court's order denying defendants' request that the identities of the anonymous posters not be revealed," he wrote in his opinion.
The law firm of Klehr, Harrison, Harvey, Branzburg, & Ellers alleges it was defamed in postings that, among other things, said its lawyers "are THE lowest of the low among attorneys."
Appeals courts in New Jersey and Delaware recently imposed a tough standard on defamation plaintiffs seeking to discover the identity of posters. In Doe v. Cahill, the Delaware Supreme Court said requiring a plaintiff to make a prima facie case for liability would protect against a "chilling effect" on anonymous speech.
But Sheppard said he would not apply the standards in Cahill or the New Jersey case, Dendrite International v. Doe, 775 A.2d 756 (2001). Instead, he cited a law review article by Michael S. Vogel in concluding that
....the notion that the implementation of new standards for cases involving plaintiff's efforts to learn the identities of anonymous internet posters will likely do more harm than good.
Vogel, incidentally, was plaintiff's counsel in Dendrite and it will certainly be interesting to see whether an appeals court gives his views as much weight as Sheppard does.
