On December 22, 2006, John Oliphant sent a mass email entitled "the Worst Party Guest Ever," in which he made insulting remarks about Ron Coons and accused him of drugging women at a party. The email included a picture of Coons and a caption saying "He's a pervert Dude."

On December 23, 2006, Coons contacted Oliphant through Oliphant's MySpace page and complained about the email.

On January 4, 2007, Coons's lawyer sent Oliphant a letter threatening legal action if he did not publish a retraction and apology.

Coons filed a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in late January. (Please see the CMLP's Database entry for the related lawsuit).

Allen Harkleroad was dissatisfied with the installation of a fence he purchased from Lowe's. When Lowe's refused to provide further assistance, Harkleroad launched a "gripe" site, Lowes-sucks.com. On the site, Harkleroad posted photos and text detailing his complaints about the installation, deploring Lowe's workmanship and customer service, and describing the actions of Lowe's attorneys and debt collectors.

On September 19, 2007, LF, LLC, a company that owns and manages Lowe's trademarks, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Harkleroad. The letter asserted that Harkleroad's use and alteration of Lowe's trademarks on his site, as well as in the domain name itself, constituted trademark infringement under federal law. The letter warned that LF would "consider other legal remedies" if Harkleroad did not respond by Sept. 28, 2007.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing Harkleroad in the dispute. A September 24, 2007 update on Lowes-sucks.com indicated that Harkleroad's attorneys had been in contact with Lowe's attorneys about a settlement. Ars Technica reported on September 26, 2007 that Harkleroad made a settlement "counter-offer," to which Lowe's had not yet responded.

The Lowes-sucks.com website is no longer operational, leading us to believe that the parties settled.

Todd Hollis objected to the description posted about him on DontDateHimGirl.com, a website that allows women to post about men and warn other women about them. Mr. Hollis sued Tasha Joseph/Cunningham, the operator of the website, alleging defamation in Pennsylvania state court, after she refused to remove the posts.

According to the initial complaint, four separate profiles were created by anonymous users of the site, which allegedly falsely claimed that Hollis had multiple children and had herpes; was "gay" or "bi"; had given the user an STD; and that he "wears dirty clothes," "complains about paying child support", and that his "crib is a dump."  (Compl. ¶ 20, 25-26, 30, 34.)  Hollis claims to have complained to Joseph/Cunningham, who refused to remove the profiles.  (Compl. ¶ 23.)  

Hollis sued Joseph/Cunningham, the Cavelle Company, Inc. (the registrant for dontdatehimgirl.com), and three individuals who he claims were responsible for the false profiles for defamation, seeking $50,000 in actual damages plus punitive damages.

Joseph and the Cavelle Company moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction.  The Pennsylvania court granted this motion with respect to Joseph/Cunningham, a resident of Florida, and the Cavelle Company.  Hollis filed a second lawsuit in federal court in Florida on November 29, 2007.

The Chicago Department of Public Health released a Winter 2006 report regarding a “cluster” of HIV and other STD outbreaks at a Chicago apartment building. The report noted that the outbreaks were associated with Flavaworks, an Internet pornography company that had used the building as a base for some of its pornographic ventures – including the site, "Cocodorm.com." Flavaworks subsequently was involved with investigations stemming from the report and other legal issues. Alongside print media coverage of the Flavaworks situation, bloggers Cannick and Tarver wrote posts critical of the company. According to the bloggers' sites, both received e-mails from Flavaworks asking for those posts to be removed. They refused.

Flavaworks then filed a complaint with Tarver's Web host, alleging that Tarver's use of a Cocodorm photo in his post infringed the company's copyrights. The Web host removed the photo from the blog without consulting Tarver. Tarver then replaced the photo, prompting the Web host to shut down his blog until he explained the situation. His blog was put back online without the photo, but the blog post remained intact.

In June 2007, a Flavaworks attorney sent letters to Cannick and Tarver alleging that they had defamed the company in their posts. Interestingly, the letter took issue with the bloggers' statements that Flavaworks was trying to shut down their blogs simply because they had criticised the company. It warned the bloggers that they would face legal action if they each did not issue an immediate public retraction and pay $250,000 before July 18. Both bloggers refused.

Flavaworks did not pursue legal action following Cannick's and Tarver's rejection of the terms of the letter. Although Cannick noted in a blog post that she had received notice Flavaworks was suing her, this statement referred to the letter discussed above, rather than a case filing.

Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, an unknown person posted messages on an AOL bulletin board purporting to offer for sale t-shirts and other items which supported or made light of the bombing in Oklahoma City. The messages contained Kenneth Zeran’s first name and phone number.

After Zeran received outraged calls and death threats, he complained to AOL, which removed the postings but did not post a retraction. Similar messages continued to appear on AOL for several weeks despite Zeran’s request that AOL block such messages.

Zeran originally filed negligence and defamation claims in Oklahoma, claiming that AOL was responsible for the postings. AOL moved to have the suit transferred to Virginia, where it was decided.

On March 27, 2007, the district court granted AOL's motion to dismiss. See Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 958 F.Supp. 1124 (E.D. Va. 1997).

On November 12, 1997, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision on appeal. See Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327, 328 (4th Cir. 1997). The Court of Appeals based its ruling on Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act, which states: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

The Court of Appeals also rejected Zeran's argument that Section 230 should not apply in this case because the messages at issue had been posted before the statute was enacted.

An anonymous blogger made critical statements about Gwen Shamblin, leader of the Remnant Fellowship church, and about the group's beliefs and practices. One of the statements implied that two Remnant Fellowship members who were indicted for beating their eight-year old son to death had relied on advice from "Remnant leadership." Other statements detailed the prices paid by Shamblin for properties she owned. The anonymous blogger also allegedly posted photographs of the children of Remnant Fellowship members, family photos, names and ages of children, and members' home addresses.

Sixty-seven members of the group, including Shamblin, filed a lawsuit against the anonymous blogger in Tennessee state court, claiming defamation and false light invasion of privacy. The plaintiffs also named Reverend Rafael Martinez, who runs a website dedicated to warning the public about cults, in the complaint. Martinez maintains that he had no connection whatsoever to the anonymous blogger. The complaint alleges that Martinez defamed the plaintiffs by making statements that the church's practices were "dangerous and destructive" and indicating that church doctrine advocated "extreme fasting" and "extreme discipline for children," including spankings and whippings.

Martinez moved to dismiss the claim against him in January 2007. The court granted his motion in April 2007, but granted the plaintiffs permission to amend the complaint. Rather than amending, the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew the lawsuit.

Two female Yale Law School students, captioned as Does I & II, sued Anthony Ciolli, the former chief education director of the popular law school admissions forum, AutoAdmit, and a host of pseudonymous users of the forum over vulgar, sexually explicit, and threatening comments posted about them on the forum. In addition to making numerous derogatory and sexually explicit statements about the two students, pseudonymous users of the site created another website, t14talent: The Most Appealing Women @ Top Law Schools (now defunct), and posted photographs of one of the students without her permission. (Although the complaint is not entirely clear on this point, the student claims copyright ownership in these photographs in addition to publicity rights, indicating that she may have been the creator of the photos and posted them online.)

According to the complaint, the two students complained about the forum postings to the AutoAdmit staff, but AutoAdmit did not remove the material. Ciolli disputes that he had any authority to remove the offensive postings.

In June 2007, the two students sued in federal court in Connecticut, asserting claims of defamation, copyright infringement, unauthorized appropriation of name and likeness, unreasonable publicity given to another's life, false light invasion of privacy, and other torts. Soon after filing, they moved to proceed anonymously, and the court granted that request.

In August 2007, the plaintiffs moved to modify the court's scheduling order in order to give them time to investigate the identity of the pseudonymous defendants and to amend their complaint. The court granted the initial request and two subsequent requests for thirty-day extensions, the last of which was requested on October 4. According to a tip posted on David Lat's Above the Law blog, it is unlikely that the court will grant a fourth extension, so an amended complaint may be forthcoming relatively soon.

Update:

11/8/07 - Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint dropping Ciolli from the lawsuit.

1/24/08 - Plaintiffs filed a motion for expedited discovery seeking to uncover the identities of the pseudonymous posters listed in the complaint.

1/29/08 - Court granted motion for expedited discovery.

2/22/08 - Pseudonymous defendant "AK47" moved to quash the subpoena directed at AT&T requesting information about his identity.

3/2/08 - Plaintiffs deposed former defendant Anthony Ciolli, at which Ciolli acknowledged that his AOL Instant Messenger username is "AnthonyCiolli."

3/4/08 - Former defendant Anthony Ciolli filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court against the plaintiffs, their lawyers, and other defendants for wrongful initiation of civil proceedings, abuse of process, libel, slander, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contract, and unauthorized use of name or likeness.

3/18/08 - Plaintiffs issued a subpoena to AOL seeking the names of "all persons who have registered or used" the username "AnthonyCiolli" and related information about the account, including "other user names and login IDs and/or Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses associated with the IM username 'AnthonyCiolli.'"

4/7/08 - Ciolli filed a motion to quash the AOL subpoena in federal district court in Virginia.

06/13/08 - The court denied AK47's motion to quash the subpoena seeking his identity from AT&T.

08/05/08 - Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint that names Mathew C. Ryan (previously known by username ":D") as a defendant. Legal Satyricon "can confirm with 100% certainty that the guy in the complaint is neither an attorney nor a law professor."

8/13/08 - Defendant "a horse walks into a bar", a.k.a Ryan Mariner filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that the plaintiff's have stated no cause of action against him and that they have failed to prosecute the action against him despite offers to accept service made through counsel. 

9/10/08 - Plaintiffs filed papers in opposition to Mariner's motion to dismiss.

9/19/08 - The United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia held that the plaintiffs' subpoena to AOL seeking the names of "all persons who have registered or used" the username "AnthonyCiolli" was facially invalid because it was issued from the wrong court.  The court determined that it should have issued from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Because the court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction, it did not reach the merits of Anthony Ciolli's motion to quash. 

10/26/08 - Plaintiffs filed a notice of settlement and request for dismissal against defendant "Whamo."

3/31/09 - Pennsylvania federal court largely denied the defendants' motion to dismiss Anthony Ciolli's complaint in Ciolli v. Iravani, but gave defendants leave to renew their motion after jurisdictional discovery.  The court also struck certain allegations from the complaint relating to settlement negotiations in the Connecticut lawsuit. 

4/30/09 - Connecticut federal court denies Matthew Ryan's motion to dismiss. 

5/21/09 - Matthew Ryan files his answer to the second amended complaint in Connecticut federal court.

9/29/09 - Plaintiffs filed a Notice of Settlement and Request for Dismissal of Action Against Defendant ":D", A.K.A. Matthew C. Ryan

10/16/09 - Plaintiffs filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal of Action Against Remaining Defendants Without Prejudice by Doe 1, Doe 2

10/23/09 - Court dismissed case

In December 2005, high school student Justin Layshock posted a fake MySpace page parodying his high school principal, Eric Trosch. Layshock posted a picture of Trosch and answered the questions asked by the site's profile template by riffing on the word "big" because Trosch is apparently a large man. Answers included phrases like "big faggot," "big hard ass," and "big dick." To the question, "what did you do on your last birthday," Layshock answered "too drunk to remember." Layshock created the profile from a computer at his grandmother's home.

School officials discovered the profile, and the school distict suspended Layshock for 10 days, ordered him to finish high school in an "Alternative Education Program," and forbid him from attending graduation. The school backtracked on part of this disciplinary action, however, and Layschock was allowed to return to regular classes. He graduated in Spring 2006.

Layshock and his parents sued the school district and various school officials in federal district court in Pennsylvania, claiming (1) that the school's punishment violated his First Amendment rights, (2) that the school's policies and rules were vague and/or overbroad in violation of the First Amendment; and (3) that the school's punishment violated Layshock's parents' Fourteenth Amendment rights to raise, nurture, discipline and educate him.

In July 2007, the district court granted summary judgment to Layshock on his claim that that the school's punishment violated his First Amendment rights and ordered a trial to determine whether he is entitled to compensatory damages for that violation. The court granted summary judgment to the defendants on all other counts.

Eric Trosch subsequently sued Layshock and three other students in Pennsylvania state court for defamation based on this and two other fake MySpace profiles. (Please see the related CMLP Database entry for more information).

Update:

11/13/2007 - Parties jointly moved for final judgment and to stipulate damages of $10,000 to the Layshocks contingent on appeal.

11/14/2007 - Judge entered the judgment.

11/21/2007 - Hermitage School District filed notification of its intent to appeal.

11/30/2007 - Layshocks filed notification of their intent to cross appeal.

3/27/2008 - Hermitage School District filed its appellate brief.

5/22/2008 - Layshocks filed their appellate brief.

12/10/2008 - Case was argued before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.   

02/04/2010 - The Third Circuit upheld the lower court's rulings.

04/09/2010 - The Third Circuit granted the Hermitage School District's petition for an en banc rehearing on whether it violated Layshock's First Amendment rights.

06/03/2010 - Case was argued en banc before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals

06/13/2011 - The Third Circuit affirmed the lower court's grant of summary judgment to Layshock on his First Amendment claim. The Third Circuit noted that the School District did not, on appeal, challenge the district court's finding that there was no evidence of a "substantial disruption of the school environment," and further held that accessing the school's website for the principal's photo was insufficient to forge a nexus between the Hermitage School District and the profile Layshock created. The Court also found that while Layshock's speech reached much of the student body, it did not reach within the "schoolhouse gate."

10/14/2011- The Hermitage School District petitioned for a Writ of Certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States on Layshock' First Amendment claim. The School District filed a single petition with Blue Mountain School District.

01/17/2012 - The Supreme Court denied Hermitage School District's petition for a Writ of Certiorari.

Paul McMann, a Massachusetts real estate developer, sued the anonymous operator of an Internet "gripe site" about him. The website contained a photograph of Mr. McMann, the statement that he "turned lives upside down," and a suggestion to "be afraid, be very afraid." The website announced that it would soon be updated with specific evidence of McMann's alleged misdealings. McMann claimed that the unknown party operating the website violated his statutory and common law right of privacy, infringed his common-law copyright, and committed defamation. McMann sought to subpoena ISPs to discover the identity of the website operator.

The United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts held that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction because McMann asserted only state-law claims and did not identify the citizenship of the anonymous defendant. The court observed that diversity of citizenship between McMann and the ISPs that he sought to subpoena could not bestow subject-matter jurisdiction on the court. The court stated in the alternative that it would dismiss the underlying case for failure to state a claim. Relying on Doe v. Cahill, 884 A.2d 451 (Del.2005), an important case from the Delaware Supreme Court, the court opined that First Amendment protections for anonymous speech requires courts to impose a heightened preliminary burden on plaintiffs seeking to discover the identity of anonymous posters.

The court concluded that McMann could not meet this heightened burden because his complaint failed to even state a claim upon which relief could be granted. Specifically, the court held that the unknown website operator's publishing of a description of McMann's business activity and distributing a publicly available photograph did not impinge McMann's statutory right of privacy as a matter of law. It also found that McMann could not recover for misappropriation of his likeness because the website operator had not used his photograph for a commercial use, but rather for purposes of criticism. The court also held that Massachusetts does not recognize a common law cause of action for false light invasion of privacy, and that McMann's common law copyright claim was preempted by federal copyright law. Finally, the court indicated that McMann's defamation claim was fatally flawed because the statements at issue were non-actionable personal opinions that could not be proven true or false. McMann v. Doe, 460 F.Supp.2d 259 (D.Mass. 2006).

McMann later filed a nearly identical suit in Arizona.

Joanne Yoon filed suit against Jeff Schwilk, the founder of San Diego Minutemen, Sharon Bush, and activist Ray Carney, for defamation over comments and a photograph posted to a password-protected Yahoo group, which implied that she was a prostitute. She also challenged comments in e-mails between the two defendants and other Minutemen members.

Yoon claims that the defendants targeted her because of her work with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation and the ACLU, which monitored Minutemen rallies at day-labor sites. Yoon seeks $1 million in compensatory damages.