Thursday, August 27, 2009

Do You Remember "OrthoMom"?

Orthomom no longer posts regularly - her last one was in June 2008 and then this popped up in May. She once came to my aid when I was attacked by Wonkette and threatened with a lawsuit. (Now that was a story).

Well she "made history" by managing to stave off an attempt to unmask her identity as a result of an incident over some criticism regarding a schoolo board issue.

Working in her favor was that the actual comment was not her's.


Anyway, in a parallel case - but different - I've read:

This story:-

The wild frontier we now know and (mostly) love called the blogosphere is a not-always-okay corral where Free Speech is armed and often dangerous.

The latest showdown is between two women -- a Vogue model and an anonymous blogger -- at odds over what is permissible in the name of free expression. After the blogger called Liskula Cohen a "skank," among other things, the model demanded her identity from the blog host, Google. A New York Supreme Court judge agreed that she was entitled to the information and ordered the company to reveal her name.

Outraged, the blogger, revealed as Rosemary Port, is launching a $15 million lawsuit against Google for disclosing her identity. Google's Andrew Pederson said that while his company sympathizes with victims of cyber-bullying, "We also take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order."

...The model case isn't insignificant, however, and raises weighty questions about privacy, anonymity and the future of e-free speech.

The problem of online defamation is hardly new, but several recent lawsuits have begun challenging the anything-goes modus operandi of the Internet. One of the most famous dates to 2006, when Sue Scheff won a staggering $11.3 million verdict against a woman who had posted hundreds of defamatory comments about Scheff and her company, which counsels the parents of troubled teens...In her new book, "Google Bomb," due for release Sept. 1 and co-authored with attorney John W. Dozier Jr., Scheff tells the story of her lawsuit and offers advice to others similarly defamed online.

"Google bomb" is Internet slang for attempting to raise the ranking of a given page during a Google search. The popularity of a page may not reflect the page's relationship to truth, but it may be popular for other reasons. Let's just say, nasty sells.


There's more there.

2 comments:

Jack Steiner said...

Orthomom was the first person I thought of when I read that article.

YMedad said...

Great minds more or less think almost similarly