In October 1998, Intel Corporation sued Ken Hamidi, a former employee, in California state court on claims of trepass to chattels and nuisance. The dispute arose when Hamidi created the Former and Current Employees of Intel ("FACE-Intel") website and began sending mass emails critical of Intel to its employees. Intel asked Hamidi to stop sending the emails and sued him when he refused.

The California trial court granted Intel a preliminary injunction prohibiting Hamidi from sending further emails to Intel employees. During the course of litigation, Intel dropped its nuisance claim and gave up its demand for money damages. It then moved for summary judgment on its trespass to chattels claim, and the trial court granted summary judgment to the company in June 1999. At this point, the court permanently enjoined Hamidi from sending email to Intel addresses.

Hamidi appealed the ruling, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU each submitted amici curiae briefs on his behalf. Nonetheless, in December 2001, the California Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's ruling.

In January 2002, Hamidi petitioned the California Supreme Court to review the case. In June 2003, the Supreme Court overturned the lower courts' rulings and dismissed the case against Hamidi. It ruled that Intel's trespass to chattels claim failed as a matter of law because Hamidi's emails did not damage or impair Intel's computers. The court indicated that, had the quantity of Hamidi's emails been high enough to damage Intel's systems, trespass to chattels might apply. In this case, however, "the claimed injury [was] located in the disruption or distraction caused to recipients by the contents of the e-mail messages, an injury entirely separate from, and not directly affecting, the possession or value of personal property." Intel Corp. v. Hamidi, 71 P.3d 296, 300-01 (Cal. 2003).

On September 28, 1998, the Los Angeles Times sued the Free Republic website for copyright infringement in federal court in California. Users of Free Republic, a conservative internet forum founded and operated by James Robinson, frequently posted copies of articles of interest for discussion on the site. According to the complaint, articles from the Times and the Washington Post were copied verbatim and in their entirety.

Free Republic asserted that the copies constituted fair use under copyright law and were a mode of free speech under the First Amendment, and moved for summary judgment on those grounds on October 19, 1999. The Times filed a cross-motion for partial summary judgment on the question of infringement. The court denied Free Republic's motion and granted the Times' motion, ruling that the fair use doctrine's factors weighed in favor of the Times and that enforcing the plaintiffs' copyright claims did not impermissably restrict the speech of Free Republic users.

On November 16, 2000, the court entered final judgment in favor of the Times, and ordered Free Republic to remove all of the plaintiffs' copyrighted material from its website and enjoined Free Republic from posting any new copyrighted material in the future. (The court did note that Free Republic could post copyrighted material if it met the requirements of the fair use doctrine.) The court also awarded the Times $1 million in statutory damages from Robinson and Free Republic. Electronic Orchard, an Internet programming and design company owned by Robinson, was not found liable for damages.

Free Republic appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. While on appeal, the parties agreed on a modified version of the district court's judgment and settled the case. The modified judgment still retained the injunction but reduced the damage award from $1 million to $5,000 to the Times and $5,000 to the Post. The Court of Appeals remanded the case back to the trial court for the purposes of entering the modified judgment.

Dealbreaker.com, a website that describes itself as "an online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip site," received a letter from counsel for Solengo Capital, a hedge fund founded by former Amaranth Advisors traders, asserting that Dealbreaker's posting of Solengo's prospectus was a violation of Solengo's copyright.

In response to the letter, editors at Dealbreaker said the materials were of legitimate news value and refused to remove them, telling Reuters:

"We think it's valuable to our readers and the public to be able to see the information in it," said John Carney, DealBreaker editor, in an interview on Friday.

The legal dust-up is the latest stemming from the abrupt implosion of $9.3 billion hedge fund Amaranth last year, which shocked investors and raised awareness of hedge fund risk. The recent founding of Solengo by some of the energy traders blamed for the $6 billion in losses that caused the Amaranth collapse has also generated controversy.

Carney, a former corporate lawyer, said his site plans to contest any legal challenge. "We're willing to take it as far as it merits. I don't expect to defy a court order or go to jail for it, however."

On March 30, 2007, Solengo followed up the letter with an order to show cause seeking a preliminary injunction ordering Dealbreaker to remove the prospectus from its website. After the court denied the injunction request, Solengo filed a complaint alleging copyright infringement against the website and several of its editors.

Loretta DiAnne Cruse, a former special-ed teacher at Norfolk Elementary School in Arkansas, sued the Teacher Smackdown website, 451 Press, LLC, which operates the website, and various individuals associated with it, including professional blogger Anne-Marie Nichols, for defamation and other claims in Arkansas state court. Teacher Smackdown is a watchdog site, which describes its function as "identif[ying] the molesters, thieves, and lecherous adults masquerading as teachers in our society" and "giv[ing] parents resources and information on protecting our kids and identifying these monsters." According to the complaint, an April 18, 2007 article written by Nichols falsely claimed that Cruse "plead guilty to endangering the welfare of a minor and physically abus[ing] the handicapped minor, when, in fact, she was acquitted of the crime at trial." Cmplt. ¶ 1.

The complaint also alleges that Teacher Smackdown published defamatory user comments, including the statement "Man. What a heartless bitch." Cmplt. ¶ 14. It further alleges that the website published user comments to, among other things, "generate income through increased traffic [to the] website" and to "generate greater name recognition within Arkansas." Cmplt. ¶ 14. It also alleges that the defendants knowingly and intentionally offered commenters anonymity in order to generate controversy and generate traffic, see Cmplt. ¶ 16, and that the defendants should be held liable for the defamation of anonymous users because "users do not post comments by their actual names." Cmplt. ¶ 15. In addition to defamation, Cruse claims that publishing user comments about her constituted intentional infliction of emotional distress. In all likelihood, these claims are completely barred by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Cruse seeks $1 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages.

Update:

03/19/09 - The Arkansas court dismissed the case for lack of personal jurisdiction over the defendants.  Nichols lives in Colorado and 451 Press is based in Alabama.

04/29/09 - Cruse has said that she might appeal the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Oliver "Buck" Revell, former associate deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, filed a defamation lawsuit against medical professor Hart G.W. Lidov and Columbia University after Lidov wrote and posted an article critizing Revell on the Columbia Journalism Review's online bulletin board. According to court documents, the article accused Revell of participating in a conspiracy that allegedly resulted in the tragic bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Revell's suit in Texas federal district court included claims against Lidov, Columbia's Board of Trustees, and the Columbia School of Journalism for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and conspiracy to commit defamation and infliction of emotion distress. His complaint also contained negligence and gross negligence claims against Columbia for publishing the article without making an adequate determination of its truth or falsity.

Both Lidov, a Harvard Medical School professor and resident of Masschusetts, and Columbia, a New York entity, filed motions to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. Revell argued in his complaint that the Texas court had specific jurisdiction over Revell and Columbia because they had engaged in purposeful conduct that caused damage in Texas. Specifically, he argued that the defendants' posting of the article was sufficient to confer jurisdiction because the online bulletin board could be accessed in Texas. Revell argued further that Columbia had sufficient commercial contacts with Texas to warrant general jurisdiction.

The district court granted the motions to dismiss. The court analyzed the online contacts under the "sliding scale" test developed in Zippo Manufacturing Co. v. Zippo Dot Com, Inc., 952 F.Supp. 1119 (W.D. Pa. 1997). Applying the test, the court determined that the bulletin board was a "passive" website and thus did not constitute sufficient contact with Texas to confer jurisdiction. The court also determined that the defendants' other contacts with Texas were minimal and thus also insufficient to warrant jurisdiction.

On appeal, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal. The Fifth Circuit closely followed the reasoning of the district court, though it also devoted significant attention to rebutting Revell's specific jurisdiction claims under the "effects" test established by Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783 (1984). The court determined that Lidov's article was not "expressly aimed" at Texas and thus could not satisfy the "effects" test.

In May 2008, Larry Dominick, the Town President of Cicero, Illinois, filed a "Petition for Discovery" in Illinois state court, seeking information from social networking site MySpace regarding a user who had created false profiles purporting to be Dominick. The petition asked the court for permission to issue interrogatories and document requests to MySpace to discover the user's identity. Interestingly, Dominick filed suit in his official capacity as Town President rather than as a private individual (see Sam Bayard's blog post for further discussion).

Dominick's petition states that Dominick "is the potential plaintiff in an action for defamation, invasion of privacy and related torts" against the creator or creators of the false profiles, but it does not identify any specific defamatory statements or describe the content of the profiles in detail. According to the Chicago Tribune, the profiles were "replete with photos and questionable comments about his sexuality and ethics." MySpace removed the profiles in response to Dominick's claims.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a motion to appear as amicus curiae in the case. On June 4, EFF submitted a brief opposing the petition for discovery and arguing that (1) the Stored Communications Act prohibits a government entity like the Town of Cicero from using ordinary discovery processes to obtain customer records from an online service like MySpace; and (2) Dominick failed to meet the heightened First Amendment requirements demanded of litigants seeking the identities of anonymous Internet speakers.

On June 13, Dominick voluntarily withdrew his complaint without prejudice. Dominick did not note the reasons for the withdrawal, but commentators such as the EFF have stated that his complaint was deficient because it lacked specific allegations of defamatory conduct and proof that the defamatory statements were false.