The much discussed AutoAdmit case, which had been pending for nearly two years, recently settled for undisclosed sums. Too bad. Not for the parties, but for us. This case promised to provide some real guidance and clarification on certain IP, libel and privacy issues in the Internet Age.
In the original complaint, two law school students brought a claim against the administrator of a web site and 30 of the site’s users for psychological and economic injury. The two plaintiffs were female students at Yale Law School and alleged that the users of a law school message board made such disparaging remarks about their character that it caused them emotional and economic harm (lost jobs when prospective employers came across these remarks when inputting their names in search
engines).
The posts occurred on AutoAdmit, a site that describes itself as “the most prestigious law school discussion board in the world” (a claim that can be construed as mere puffery given the crudeness of the comments, both then and now). The comments against the plaintiffs began in 2005 when a poster from Stanford University, where one of the women attended as an undergraduate, started a thread entitled “Stupid Bitch to Attend Yale Law”, telling everyone at Yale Law School to “watch out” for her.
This was just the first of what became a string of public insults, rumors, and (repeated) rape threats. Different users on the site also posted false information about her LSAT score and accused her of engaging in a lesbian relationship with a Yale Law School administrator in order to get admitted. The other plaintiff also was the subject of various disparaging and lewd threads on the site, and also with repeated rape threats.
The filing of the complaint began an extensive process to test the limits of the anonymity provided by the Internet and obtain the identities of the 30 posters who posted the offensive comments. The site did not require posters to register with actual names, merely e-mail addresses. The women could not sue AutoAdmit directly for defamation or harassment because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes websites from liability for the actions of their users. They
were thus forced to go after the actual individuals who posted the comments.
Ultimately, faced with the embarrassment of being outed as the posters, some of the prospective defendants settled the case through their lawyers, agreeing to provide some payment in exchange for promises from the plaintiffs not to publicize who they were (details of the settlement were not disclosed). Settlement, while often in the best interest of the parties, may not always be in the best interests of the general public who want certain issues to be tried and clarified. It seems that these important and intriguing issues will have to be resolved some other day.
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