A California Appellate court (that's Santa Clara County, home of Silicon Valley) upheld the anonymity of a poster, referred to as Doe6, who posted blatantly negative remarks about a Florida-based company and one of its officers.
Said officer wanted the ISP (Yahoo!) to reveal the identity of 10 different posters to a financial forum who were, let's just say less-than-glowing in their review of the company.
The gist of the ruling (and I'll have Andrew correct this if I'm totally wrong) is that the posters weren't making an assertion of facts, but merely expressing their opinions. So if I went around saying that a company used stockholders' money to fund terrorism and import young Asian women to work as sex slaves, we might have a problem. However, I'm protected when I say that I routinely get terrible service when I call Sprint and that some of their reps go beyond terrible and treat me like, well, let's call it excrement.
[4:39pm by Andrew: First off, I AM NOT A LAWYER. I think the only time a judge could rule to disclose the identity of the posters would be if a) the material was libelous, although since an officer of a public company might be a "public figure" the company would have to prove it was knowingly false, or b) if the information was posted in a way that would manipulate the price of the stock. Again, I AM NOT A LAWYER but that's what I think you're getting at]
In my very lay-opinion, it would just seem that if you want good word of mouth to spread (you've seen me rave about products and companies I like) then you need to be ready for people to be just as vocal when they feel they've been done wrong. If anything, a company should welcome that feedback and use it as a way to improve, not try and sue people so that they can keep making the same bad decisions that prompted the angry post in the first place.
Companies, when someone like me (or me, for that matter) writes a post or blog entry about some perceived injustice, why don't you see if the complaint has any merit?
There is nothing I would love more than to update a negative piece so that I can let people know that the situation was turned around. If we take each other seriously (businesses and their customers) we can make everything a lot easier and a lot better for everyone.
Ok, Capitol Valleyers, now it's your turn. (That's your cue to comment.)
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