Dozier Internet Law, PC: Internet Lawyer

Internet Lawyer: Domino's Pizza Video Outrage

Every Internet lawyer has a take on the video some Domino's Pizza employees made in which they were tainting food for customer consumption. Public Citizen and Paul Alan Levy are at it again, this time criticizing the legal tool used to get it off the web. Public Citizen believes it should stay up for "fair use" reasons, once again ignoring the property rights of a business and failing to understand the basics of product disparagement and defamation. 

The video is another sad example of harm a couple of derelicts can cause in the online world. While Public Citizen calls for a repeal of the DMCA, which is the copyright law used to get the video off of Youtube, as an Internet lawyer and not a biased, free speech expansionist, I suggest this is just another example of the out of control influence individual scofflaws can assert. Domino's has been harmed to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in all likelihood.

Amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act today. You can read about my thoughts on this issue of Section 230 changes in my upcoming book set to be released soon...."Google Bomb".

Dozier Internet Law: Amend Section 230 Immunity Today

Dozier Internet Law has to often remind lawyers that there is no absolute right to online anonymity. The courts have long recognized the need to unmask those who hide behind false identities on the Internet. Those who defame, those who spam, those who hack, and in some circumstances those who use commercial speech…their anonymity is rarely protected. Legal subpoenas to a website will net the IP address of the offender, and a follow up subpoena to the ISP will identify the user of the IP address at the time of the “anonymous speech”. This usually works well when Dozier Internet Law takes this approach.

But ISPs usually only hold onto their records for short periods of time. And log files may get destroyed. Log files contain the IP addresses of those posting. The virtual "disappearance" of the records used to identify thieves, crooks and scofflaws is openly encouraged on the free speech organization websites of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen through Paul Allen Levy, a First Amendment lawyer:

Levy says: Another approach to preserve anonymity of posters is to adopt a “no-logging” policy, whereby storage of identifying information about visitors to the web site (and about posted(sic) to online discussions) is kept to a minimum. Technical advice effecting such limitations can be found on EFF’s web site at …

 

An amendment to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would seem to be in order. Let's ask Congress to require log file record retention in order for an interactive service provider to avail itself of the immunity. That seems particularly reasonable given the advice to destroy the records. By the way, the EFF guidance is even grosser than Levy's comments.