Milan Jankovic, aka Philip Zepter, along with two of his businesses, Fieldpoint B.V. and United Business Activities Holding, filed suit against International Crisis Group (ICG), claiming defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and tortious interference with business expectancy. Non-profit ICG publishes newsletters, reports, and other documents aimed at influencing policymakers worldwide, apparently focusing on the prevention of armed conflict. Zepter's claims arose from ICG documents -- two reports and an e-mail -- that accused Zepter and his business ventures of improper ties to deceased Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.

On May 1, 2006, the district court dismissed plaintiffs' claims as to the e-mail and one of the reports (“Report 141”) because the statute of limitations had run. It dismissed the claims involving the other document (“Report 145”) as to Zepter's businesses because the report did not concern them and as to Zepter himself because the disputed statements were not defamatory as a matter of law. Plaintiffs amended their complaint to remove ICG employee James Lyon, who had sent the disputed e-mail, after the District Court found that Lyon's presence in the case destroyed diversity for the purposes of jurisdiction.

On July 24, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals upheld the district court's finding that the case in its original form failed due to lack of jurisdiction over Lyons. It also upheld the dismissal of all claims relating to the e-mail and Report 141 due to the statute of limitations, as well as Zepter's businesses' claims arising from Report 145.

However, the Court of Appeals held that Zepter had established a prima facie defamation case regarding certain statements in Report 145. The opinion discussed three disputed portions of Report 145 separately. It affirmed the dismissal of the claims as to the first portion, which had implicated another Zepter venture -- Zepta Banka -- but not Zepter himself. Due to the size and scope of Zepter's business enterprises, spanning more than 50 countries on five continents, the court found that statements regarding Zepta Banka did not concern Zepter.

According to the court, the second statement in Report 145 could give the impression that Zepter was a “crony” of Milosevic and thus was sufficient to establish a prima facie case of defamation. Though the Court of Appeals did not discuss them, it revived plaintiffs' false light and tortious interference claims as to the second statement in Report 145.

The Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the claims regarding the third statement in Report 145 because the statement referred to a former Zepter employee rather than Zepter himself.

The net result was that all claims against ICG were dismissed except for those involving the second statement from Report 145, which were remanded to the district court. ICG raised a number of defenses not reached by the district court or on appeal -- Opinion and Fair Comment Protection, the Fair Report Privilege, the Neutral-Reportage Doctrine -- which will be considered in the lower court.

Update:

7/24/2007 - Case remanded to district court.

5/13/2008 - ICG filed memorandum supporting its motion to dismiss first amended complaint.

5/23/2008 - Jankovic filed memorandum in opposition to ICG's motion to dismiss.

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

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).

In June 2005, Fisher & Phillips LLP, an Atlanta employment law firm, sued 5 anonymous bloggers for defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and interference with business and contractual relations. The complaint did not identify the allegedly defamatory statements with any specificity and did not name the websites on which they appeared.

After failing to identify or serve the defendants, Fisher & Phillips voluntarily dismissed the suit without prejudice in November 2005.