The first defamation suit involving the Usenet is described in a post that apparently first appeared in misc.legal.moderated, and then cross-posted into comp.org.eff.talk and alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk. (I won't include it here, though I've ended up writing enough about it that I should've just forwarded the whole thing to Cypherpunks!) It involves a professor denied tenure (and dismissed) at the University of Western Australia. Dept. of Archaeology, or similar. The defendant made some comments last summer about the incompetence of this professor (an ex-American, by the way), his habit of holding "Puppy parties" with a local boy named "Puppy" as the chief entertainment, his drinking exploits, and so on. I read the attacking post and thought it somewhat more extreme than most Usenet comments. But not by much. (And certainly comparable to the various posts Detweiler made calling various people sodomites, spies, terrorists, and so on.) Anyway, the attacked professor (no longer at UWA, for the tenure reasons cited above) filed a suit, the defendant chose not to show up for the trial, and the judge recently issued his decision: AU$40,000 to the defendent, plus 8% annual interest to have begun September 1993. Read the article to see what may be coming, in spades. Of course, our legal minds here on Cypherpunks may be able to tell us how likely such cases are to go this way in America. I can't say. More reasons for anonymity, if one truly believes free speech should be just that, unencumbered by charges of "defamation" and "damage." In the Australian case, either the professor is "upstanding" (think of Richard Feynman, for example), in which case the charges would just bounce off (while I'm no Feynman, in any sense, those "sodomite" charges of Detweiler I just shrugged off) or there's some substance to the charges (i.e., he was a dissipated, pedophilic lech, who neglected his research). Draw your own conclusions. Anonymity has its problems, but it also allows discourse to be somewhat isolated from the idiosyncrasies of the law. And of course, in my view, it it completely kosher (I wanted to say "exculpatory," as I fell into the rhythm of legal lingo, but I'd probably be misusing the word terribly) for anonymous forums to basically say: "This is a forum that allows anonymity and pseudonymous speech. If this offends you, stay out. If you want to file a lawsuit based on some insult you hear in this forum, good luck and fat chance of winning!" But then I'm a free speech radical. (What about shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater? Let those who see there's no fire beat the shit out of the twerp who shouted "Fire!" Seems fair to me.) --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."