Liskula Cohen v Rosemary Port In The Curious Case of Blogger Anonymity…
Yeah, I heard about the case of the model who successfully sued Google, in order to get them to reveal the name of an anonymous blogger who’d been mean to her.
Here’s the story from The Times Online:
A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet.
In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation.
A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.
Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after reading the wounding anonymous comments on Google’s Blogger.com.
Now that the blogger has been named-and-not-so-shamed, apparently Cohen’s planning to launch a defamatory suit against her. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.
According to the first article, Rosemary Port is now planning to sue Google for not protecting her anonymity to the tune of $15m, no less. Seriously?
Here’s what Rosemary Port had to say:
“Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: One from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it,”
She makes a good point methinks.
In my opinion, Liskula will now always be the model that that blogger called a “skank”, and “an old hag”, and Rosemary Port and her blog will have gotten no end of free publicity, the likes of which she’d have never had, before her identity was revealed. Apparently she’s due to go on Good Morning America for Oprah’s sake.
Port is going to make so much money off this case, that Liskula Cohen will probably end up wondering who really won here.
Do I think it’ll make a blind bit of difference to how the majority of bloggers act online?
Not really.
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if some bloggers out there, started to launch random attacks on ‘celebs’, in the hopes of garnering lots of free publicity for their blogs. Suing and being sued, has been the new black for years now in the USA, so nothing would surprise me.
Other bloggers will more than likely simply avoid stating insults as facts, e.g. In my opinion, I think that Liskula Cohen is an old hag.
They’ll then probably just sit back and wait to see if anybody has enough balls to try to sue them for their opinion.
Thanks to Jody Wallace for the tip-off.
Posted by Karen Scott · 
pingback:
