Are multiple online personas illegal?
KTRK-13's Ted Oberg checks in on an ongoing legal dispute in Fort Bend County that pits a master planned community against a blogger for using multiple pseudonyms to generate negative online conservations about the said master-planned community:
A Fort Bend County man says he's expressing his first amendment right of free expression. A major land developer says that the homeowner is actually misleading other people and hurting his business. This war over words first played out on the Internet, but is now moving to the courts.
We're talking about blogging on the net. The law can't always keep up with the Internet and blogging is a little like the Wild West -- there just aren't many rules. But the developer in this case, Sienna Plantation, is huge. So why would they put up a fight about what one little guy writes on a few websites?
This all starts at Chris Calvin's Sienna Plantation home.
"I love it," he said. "I wouldn't speak up if I didn't love it."
He's lived here three years and tells us he wants to stay. But he's pretty upset about hundreds of apartments the developer plans to build about a mile from his home.
"You're going to overcrowd our schools," Calvin predicted.
Months ago Calvin put up signs and circulated a petition to fight the plan. He also started blogging under the screen name 'Responsible Development.' Blogs are online journals and many times people write entries under pen names.
"I wanted to communicate what was going on in the community," Calvin said.
But as he continued to blog Calvin started using other screen names. 'Jane L', 'Buddy J', 'Jim Calhoun 1' - dozens by the time it was done. He admitted using 24 names. And that was when Sienna Plantation's developer had enough.
Sienna Plantation Attorney John Keville explained, "Chris Calvin can say any opinion he wants as long as he puts his name on it. Chris Calvin can't be a mob of 30 people."
It's the power of the Internet as an equalizer the developer says that forced them to sue. They admit much of what Calvin wrote was true or his opinion. But they say he deceived Internet readers when he created the sense that so many people shared his opinion.
Chris Elam blogged on this topic some time ago.
I don't know the applicable law here, but I have my doubts that Sienna Plantation has a strong case unless they can demonstrate false information was posted by Calvin's multiple personas. It's just not clear to me that multiple online personas posting opinion that isn't factually incorrect or slanderous or libelous can be silenced legally.
However, that kind of online behavior just seems impolite to me. Pseudonyms are allowed on the comment boards here, but it never struck me that someone might try to hijack the discussion on those boards with multiple pseudonyms until Elam blogged about it. We've since modified the terms of service, and I do watch for that sort of thing when new users register.
It will be interesting to see how the legal aspects of the dispute play out.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/14/06 05:47 PM | Print |
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