Currently, there is a lawsuit working its way up the circuit as to whether or not the identity of a chatroom poster should be revealed. Not surprisingly, this theoretically pseudonymous poster wrote damning things about someone and that someone is pissed. And not surprisingly, someone knows who this person is (namely, their ISP provider, AOL). The defense is likening this situation to Tom Paine’s pamphlet distribution, but even that comparison brings up the important question of this case: what kind of speech exists in chatrooms?
I would argue that most posters think they’re babbling in the same fashion as they would on a street corner. Those who are being slandered realize that this is not the case since that record is a bit more permanent (ah yes, sticky data). Do we compare to front lawn babblings? To early press pamphleting? To newspaper slander? What will this mean for how the law sees cyberspeech? And will the law ever change the individuals’ perception of their own speech?
