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Digital
Law Suits – Cyber Smearing
 Some
times back an unidentified poster started posting unsavory comments
against the CEO of Wade Cook Financial Corporation on one of the Yahoos
message boards under as pseudonym. As the targeted company which bas
based at Seattle had no idea about the identity of the offender it
requested Yahoo to remove the postings which were declined by Yahoo. So
the company, which was in the business of offering financial education
seminars, deiced to fight back filed a digital law suit against some 10
unknown persons for defamations.
It then issued subpoenas upon Yahoo with the intention to force
Yahoo to unmask and reveal the identity of the posters before the court
so as to enable them to add the real named of the persons in the
digital law suit.
The company clarified that their whole intention was to deter others
from maligning and defaming CEO of top companies. The suit targets the
‘cybersmears’ who get kicks out of maligning other people
in cyber space by posting unwarranted comments about well known
personalities. These cybersmears sometimes even get paid by rivals to
spread false and damaging rumors about companies. These online
discussions which start with chats turn pretty nasty as there are not
controls on such postings.
One of the senior lawyers says he is aware of atleast 25 digital law
suits which have been filed in the previous one year and of which a
majority involved cybersmears. These digital law suits are filed
against an unidentified person and then seek the process and authority
of court to establish the actual identity of the offender.
Cyber crime and civil liberties experts point out that the tend of
digital law suits against cybersmears in treading on thing ice as it
conflicts between the right of an individual to speak anonymously and
the company’s rights to protects their reputations.. This is the
classic battle between accountability and anonymity. If the identify of
a person is available easily the whole concept of anonymity will
disappear and the civil right of people will be curtailed.
Sometimes back a company called Raytheon Corp. went to the court
against individuals who posted on Yahoo messages which the company
accused that they reveled its trade secrets. Then there was a case from
a Caribbean resort who filed digital law suits against individuals who
stated in their posts that the scuba diving of the resort was unsafe.
It is practically impossible for a company like yahoo to monitor the
millions of posts comings to its thousands of forums, many of which are
full of hate posts. Digital law suits are used by targets to
force companies like yahoo to reveal the identity of the offenders but
unless these suits receive wide publicity they are not going to impact
the ongoing cyber smearing campaigns. Moreover rivals hire cybersmears
who are located at such places where the US laws have little relevance
and the offenders give a damn to the US laws of cyber land. Some
countries do not have any such laws under which the offenders could be
convicted. In such cases the courts may just order the Hosting
companies to remove the offending remarks from their web forums and
thats all which the target can to.
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