Pa. Federal Court Refuses to Force News Website to Unmask Commenters
The First Amendment rights of anonymous online commenters prevailed in the Western District of Pennsylvania last week.
Plaintiff William L. McVicker sued his former employer, the Borough of Jefferson Hills in Allegheny County, Pa., and four council members, saying he was fired in retaliation to filing a discrimination suit, the opinion (PDF provided by Citizen Media Law Blog) said. McVicker said the identities of seven commenters who posted to YourSouthHills.com around the time the Borough received his Equal Employment Opportunity Commission documents would be relevant to impeach the testimony of the four council members named in his suit and subpoenaed the site’s parent company, Trib Total Media, for information that would disclose those commenters’ identities.
If the commenters’ identities had been sought to make them defendants in a case (the typical scenario), then the test would be whether McVicker had made “a substantial legal and factual showing that the claims have merit,” Sam Bayard wrote at Citizen Media Law Project. However, McVicker sought these commenters’ identities to make them witnesses.
The court ruled that the news site had third-party standing to assert its anonymous commenters’ First Amendment rights, and that McVicker’s need to identify the witnesses did not outweigh the First Amendment rights of the anonymous commenters.
“It is clear that a party seeking disclosure must clear a higher hurdle where the anonymous poster is a nonparty,” the court wrote. It based its ruling on a four-part test established in Enterline v. Pocono Medical Center : 1) whether the subpoena was issued in good faith; 2) whether the information sought relates to a core claim; 3) whether the identifying information is materially relevant to the claim, and 4) whether the information can’t be found from another source. The court found that McVicker’s argument didn’t meet the last two standards.
“Note how it only considers the plaintiff’s needs, not the defendant’s interest in remaining anonymous,” Bayard writes of the four-part test. “I don’t have an alternative test at my fingertips, but it seems like something worth pondering.”
Related coverage:
E-Commerce and Tech Law: “Newspaper Website’s Privacy Policy Creates Expectation of Privacy for Commenters?”
