Are Bounties Better Than Lawsuits To Unmask Bad Speech?
posted by Dave Hoffman
Talking about the Autoadmit lawsuit, Anthony Ciolli argues:
“[Rather than the litigation,] a smarter way to handle this would be through private action. A few weeks ago, a lawyer offered a $15,000 bounty for the identity of the author of the Patent Troll Tracker blog. I saw no legal basis for that unmasking, but if someone wanted to rat him out for $15k, I saw nothing wrong with that either. FYI — it worked.”
The big (asserted) advantages are: (1) less collateral first-amendment damage and officially sanctioned chilling of speech; and (2) a more “poetically satisfying” form of social sanction.
I’m pretty dubious about the empirics of the first half of the claim. Bounties to unmask anonymous internet speech seem to me to be likely to create exactly the same kinds of pressure not to speak as lawsuits – more, perhaps, because bounties are cheaper and thus the likelihood of enforcement is higher. (This is all wrapped up in Solove’s book, of course). As to whether it is more poetically satisfactory to be betrayed or to lose on the merits, I this the issue is a close one. What do you think?
March 21, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Posted in: Anonymity
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Responses (4)
Jason W - March 21, 2008 at 4:00 pm
I don’t know if the TrollTracker story actually shows bounties rather than lawsuits work. There was a lawsuit where a motion to depose Google employees about the identity of TrollTracker was granted about a month before he revealed himself.
It seems plausible the anonymous email telling TT to reveal himself or he would be outed was related to the motion to depose–especially since as far as we know no one has collected the 15k bounty from Ray Niro.
TJ - March 21, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Well, also, doesn’t it depend on what the “social sanction” consists of? Bounty to expose autoadmit commentator so that the rest of the world can hold him in scorn–no First Amendment problems that I can see. Bounty to expose Troll Tracker so that various offended people can file lawsuits against him–not so different from a court simply compelling the ISP to pony up the identity.
security - March 21, 2008 at 10:43 pm
In the online context, offering a substantial bounty for the identity of an anonymous person creates an unreasonable risk of harm to the public. It’s a fundamentally outrageous act.
The reasons for my opinion have already been well-stated in connection with the Troll Tracker incident. You can find some of my comments via Google. Unfortunately, other comments —along with links to a number of supporting sources— were taken down as a collateral consequence of the closing of Troll Tracker’s blog. C’est la guerre.
Frankly, I’m not interested in arguing anymore. This is an engineering judgement, and as such is susceptible to proof or disproof in the real world.
See you in hell. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Paul Gowder - March 22, 2008 at 2:04 am
What the… ??
Who are collecting these bounties? Are they people with contractual obligations (e.g. website hosts, people involved with ISPs)? In which case, in what direction runneth the lawsuit? After all, it’s about time someone tried to enforce one of those privacy policies… and the lawyer who posts the bounty probably ought to get nailed for one of those interference with contracts torts, and possibly also an ethics complaint under, e.g., ABA model rules 4.4, model code DR 7-102(8), etc.
If not, well, how effective are they going to be? Anonymous troublemakers can just not tell their buddies that they’re, well, anonymously making trouble.
Seriously. This is an utterly moronic idea.
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