More on the AutoAdmit case:
"The Web 2.0 revolution in self-published content is making the already tangled legal debate around anonymity even harder to unravel. Take the case of a couple of female Yale Law School students whose reputations have been sullied on an online bulletin board called AutoAdmit. The plaintiffs had to drop Anthony Ciolli, the law student in charge of AutoAdmit, from the suit. This is because the law treats websites differently from traditional publishers in terms of their liability for libelous content.
In Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Congress granted websites and Internet service providers immunity from liability for content posted by third parties. So a paper-and-ink newspaper can be sued for publishing a libelous letter from a reader, but, under Section 230, Web bulletin boards such as AutoAdmit have no legal responsibility for the published content of their users. Thus the students are now pursuing the identities of their defamers independently of AutoAdmit - a near impossible task.
Such cases indicate that the Supreme Court soon might need to rethink the civic value of anonymous speech in the Digital Age. Today, when cowardly anonymity is souring Internet discourse, it really is hard to understand how anonymous speech is vital to a free society.
Source
A right to free speech and a right to anonymous free speech certainly seem different to me. The first Amendment guarantees the first of the two but says nothing of the second.
Previous posts on the AutoAdmit case on Feb. 14, 2008 and June 18, 2007 and June 5th. 2007
