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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dantecristo who wrote (5180)	10/1/2003 7:11:53 PM
From: John Sladek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12465

Dante, By the same token, someone could take a photograph of the scrolling text on CNN, print it, and thereby make a fixed representation of it. Eisenberg questioned whether the verdict should be overturned because the case should have been slander, not libel. By posting messages on the Internet, in a forum that is not permanent, Delfino and Day could not be accused of libel because they were not creating a “fixed representation to the eye,” he argued. The panel voiced serious doubts about that argument too. “If I press print, they would become libel,” Elia said. “I can’t see the distinction.”

To: dantecristo who wrote (5180)	10/1/2003 10:25:28 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12465

Mary, the judge is clearly clueless. If I were your lawyer, I'd go on Yahoo and take about a dozen posts from popular message boards to show the sort of stuff that one finds there on perhaps a minute by minute basis. Just for fun, here's a sampling that took me literally five minutes to find... ----- 1. From the Amazon board. Looks like libel per se to me: Sonny Says by: nicholas_crutcher (M/St. Croix) 10/01/03 09:30 pm Msg: 686641 of 686649 Amazon is a scam. finance.messages.yahoo.com ===== 2. From the Yahoo board. Do you think the judge would find this speech a tad offensive? YHOO, don't show Hillary's ugly face by: flightsimsrme 10/01/03 05:22 pm Msg: 450752 of 450768 I opened up the yahoo main page page and there was Hillary Rotten Clinton's hideous freaking mug staring right at me. Yahoo, please give a little warning before you pull that sh*t. What is your fascination from that communist bitch? the one that illegally used FBI files to go after her enemies and just legally harrass white House workers. Remember the Hillary Socialist Health care Plan she tried to stuff down our throats. The Clintons are treasonists and I hope Bush deports both their sorry asses out of our country. Deport them to China since they like that country so much. finance.messages.yahoo.com Note: === 3. From the IBM board. Looks like blatant racism to me. filthy jews looking for Fries by: sellatbids1 10/01/03 05:37 pm Msg: 269736 of 269761 Also another good movie missing in an action(filthy jews looking for Fries). You'll see how proud is filthy jews to stop people from telling the truth. finance.messages.yahoo.com ----- I'm not by any means condoning such behavior including yours. I'm just pointing out that unless your lawyer gives the panel some context you'll be fighting an uphill battle. Eisenberg really needs to hammer home that the Internet is a brand new media. Whereas a newspaper or book has a certain structure to it (whereby the entity itself ascribes to a certain standard), the Internet has no structure. To try to lump it in with the conventional print media is absurd. What about Internet-only radio stations? Certainly I can see how it might be natural, especially for a judge, to want to apply conventional labels to various types of Internet content (i.e. anything in print as libel and anything spoken as slander). Perhaps Eisenberg's best strategy might be to take a more novel (and perhaps compromise) approach: that the net is a unique form of communication and thus in need of its own set of laws. While he understands how your speech might not exactly fit the laws pertaining to slander, his point is that it's not libel either. I'm sure he'd be able to come up with numerous examples of how technology has forced us to create new laws to keep up, the Internet being the next big legal frontier. - Jeff