A legal wrangle between a Canadian metal reprocessing firm and the senders of anonymous messages to an Internet chat site looks set to become a landmark battle between those promoting free speech on the Internet and those protecting firms from alleged online libel. But whatever way it goes, the case has already shown that anonymity doesn't keep Internet users beyond the reach of the law.
The case centres around Philip Services of Hamilton, Ontario, which earlier this month (July 7th) received court orders forcing Internet service providers (ISPs) to release the names of several people who posted anonymous messages to a discussion site hosted by Yahoo!, the US-based Internet services site. Some Canadian ISPs have already forwarded names to the company, and US court action is proceeding. The names of the ISPs have not all been made public yet, but they include AOL, CompuServe, and Weslink.
In the last couple of years Internet messaging boards have become a popular medium in which investors (or just those interested enough) discuss the future prospects and share information of publicly-quoted companies. Most people posting messages to Internet chat and message areas use pseudonyms, and the informal nature of the medium often leads to heated exchanges between anonymous contributors who could range from speculators to disgruntled employees to company representatives.
Contributors to Yahoo!'s message board dedicated to Philip Services have had a lot to talk about in the last six months. During that time the company has had to restate up to three years' of earnings following the discovery of rogue copper trading and its stock price has crashed to about $2 (£1.42) from a year-high of $20. Compounding its problems, the company has lost many of its senior management and lost $126 million last year.
However, company spokeswoman Ms Lynda Kuhn insisted the messages on the board which Philip Services is objecting to "are nothing to do with comment on the company, good, bad or indifferent". She said messages from a group of "no more than 12" anonymous contributors amounted to threats of violence against company staff. She said the court order is targeting people calling themselves Countbuster and Skeptic666, among others.
"This has nothing to do with freedom of speech and everything to do with persecution and stalking threats," she said, citing examples of messages which suggested the senders of the messages were watching the houses of company managers. But the exact content of the messages will remain unclear until the court papers are opened, as Yahoo! has removed the offending messages from the board. However, Ms Kuhn said: "Two judges agreed they went far and beyond legitimate or lawful criticism."
So far only two of the contributors have been named. One, John Gallagher, is a former Hamilton city councillor who used three aliases, but his ISP forwarded his name to Philip Services following the court order. The other, Paul Palango, a journalist, used his real name as part of what he calls an "overt, online investigation". The contributors accuse Philip Services of trying to deflect attention from its own problems. Mr Palango, a freelance journalist and former editor at the Globe and Mail newspaper, said most of the content on the message board has been fair comment on the company's problems.
The Philip Services case has rattled anonymous contributors to the Internet's many bulletin boards and chat groups. Anonymity isn't, it seems, guaranteed after all, and although multinationals like Intel and Microsoft might shrug off online criticism, the message is clear: allegedly online libel can be traced.
The two largest Irish ISPs have never been served with court orders to reveal identities of customers who send information on the Internet. However, the technology is available to track messages, said Garfield Connolly, head of operations at Ireland On-Line. He said message board operators such as Yahoo! know the Internet addresses from which messages are sent, meaning they can identify an ISP.
Mr Connolly said the ISPs can trace these addresses to individual users if it's known what time a message was sent, using logs of user activity. However, in IOL's case he could not say how long these logs were kept and he stressed such information would not normally be divulged.
Indigo, the second-largest ISP, has a similar policy. Its general manager, Mark Beggs, said: "To date we have never been asked by any authority whatsoever to release names." However, logs are stored so the entire two-and-a-half year company record is retrievable, he added. This means anonymous Indigo customers who contributed to message boards in the past could yet be identified if legal action were ever taken.
Having burst the bubble of Internet anonymity, it remains to be seen what, if anything, Philip Services does with the names it is retrieving. If it secures libel convictions, the repercussions for the Internet message boards will be huge. In the meantime, though, it has raised the profile of the very message board it finds offensive. Perhaps that's why, as Ms Kuhn put it, there haven't been too many precedents.
Eoin Licken is at elicken@irish-times.ie
