EFF "Censorship & Free Expression - SLAPPs" Archive

Cases - SLAPP

• Barrett_v_Clark
  Directory of information about a case in which (among other things) plaintiffs sought to silence a critic of breast implant technologies, Ilena Rosenthal, with false defamation accusations.
• Kesler v. Doe
  Directory of information on a case in which EFF has sumbitted briefs defending a John Doe defendant, a.k.a. "Mezzzman", from attempts to force ISP to reveal defendant's identity in a defamation case. EFF argues both First Amendment and anti-SLAPP positions.
• Hollis-Eden v. Wells
  Information relating to a lawsuit by Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals in which the company is attempting to silence a critic. Hollis-Eden says their case is not a SLAPP case because the critic, Michael Wells, is a shareholder and that this pecuniary interest trumps California's anti-SLAPP statute and the First Amendment. EFF begs to differ, in an amicus brief.

IP SLAPP

Information relating to abuse of intellectual property law to silence critics, prevent reverse engineering, defend a monopoly or obsolete business model, or harm competitors, or thwart the public interest.

• 20010606_eff_barney_cd.html
  Original Barney® "Cease and Decist" email from Gibney Anthony & Flaherty
• 20010706_eff_barney_response.html
  Electronic Frontier Foundation response to legal threats from "Barney" character trademark holders' legal threats, relating to Barney parodies in an e-zine a copy of which was archived on EFF's web site. EFF analyzes and dismisses the shaky legal arguments that the opposing attorneys have attempted to use against EFF and numerous other parties. July 6, 2001
• 20010301_pacifica_letter.html
  An open letter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Board of Directors of the Pacifica Foundation concerning their attempt to silence critics by taking away domain names registered to various critics.

• Blizzard_v_bnetd/
  Iinformation relating to threats of legal action from Blizzard (Vivendi Universal) against the bnetd project, an open source initiative to provide a free software means of connecting to Blizzard's online gaming network.
• DVDCCA case
  DVD Content Control Association's court case attempting to censor and punish people for reverse-engineering the encryption system used for decoding content on Digital Versatile Discs (mislabeled Digital Video Discs by the DVD CCA organization). DVD CCA boldly and unbelievably alleges that efforts to make DVDs interoperable with the open-source Linux operating system, via the "DeCSS" software at issue in the case, violates movie industry trade secrets under Calif. law. See also the related MPAA DVD cases
• Ford v. GreatDomains
  Using laws intended to prevent "cybersquatting", Ford sued several independent website operators, whose domain names contain, in part, the words "volvo", "ford" and "jaguar", but whose content and appearance vastly differ from Ford's corporate sites. In the most egregious example, Ford accused http://www.jaguarcenter.com, a site about big cats created by a child, of trademark infringement. At issue: the right to publish one's creative works without fear of being unfairly sued for copyright infringement. EFF role: Defending several of those charged, along with local pro bono counsel Eric Grimm and David Lowenschuss in Michigan.
• MPAA DVD cases
  Motion Picture Association of America members (major movie studios) and their lawsuits against a variety of parties making the DeCSS DVD encryption decoder available for download (software that enables legally-owed Digital Versatile Disc audiovisual content to be played on the open-source Linux operating system). The MPAA members make incredible claims of illegal circumvention of copy protection measures (weak DVD encryption that was reverse engineered in the creation of DeCSS), basing these claims on unconstitutional provisions of the 1999 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). See also the related DVD CCA case, above.
• Scientology cases
  Directory of information regarding the Church of Scientology's all-out attack against critics on the Net. Includes: the RTC & Bridge Pubs. (CoS) v. Erlich, Klemesrud & Netcom; RTC (CoS) v FACTnet, Wollersheim & Penny; and RTC (CoS) v. Lerma & Washington Post cases.

Cases involving discovery abuse

Information relating to abuse of legal discovery (a legal term of art meaning a court order to turn over documents or other information), including subpoenas, to strip online commentators of anonymity (or otherwise misuse the discovery process to silence critics).

• 2TheMart_case/
  Directory on the 2TheMart.com (a.k.a. the "NoGuano" J. Doe) case. In this anonymity case, EFF and ACLU-WA are asking the court to protect the identity of an anonymous Internet speaker where the "J. Doe" (who used the pseudonym "NoGuano") is not a party to the case, and no allegations of liability against Doe/NoGuano have been made.
• Jane_Doe_v_John_Hritz/
  Directory of information on Jane Doe v. John Hritz (a.k.a. John Hritz v. Jane Doe, at the District Court level). The gist of the case is that an executive at a large corporation is attempting to abuse legal discovery under Ohio state law, to "out" an anonymous critic. Hritz has attempted to force Doe's ISP to reveal her identity, but has filed no lawsuit, pressed no charges, nor taken any other reasonable legal action to justify the discovery of Doe's identity. Doe has appealed the application for pre-trial discovery (a peculiarity of this state's laws) because there is no legal cause of action, and Hritz appears to simply be seeking this information for personal, and legally illegitimate, reasons, such as silencing Doe's criticism.
• Kesler_v_Doe/
  Directory of information on a case in which EFF has sumbitted briefs defending a John Doe defendant, a.k.a. "Mezzzman", from attempts to force ISP to reveal defendant's identity in a defamation case. EFF argues both First Amendment and anti-SLAPP positions.
• PrePaid_Legal_v_Sturtz/
  Directory of information concerning the pseudonymity battle wherein PrePaid Legal Services seeks the indentity of online critics, in the midst of a lawsuit against (known) third parties. PPLS alleges that they seek to find out whether the posters are employees who breached non-disclosure agreements (by way of what they posted), yet nothing posted by them could possibly be covered by an NDA, and it seems clear that PPLS simply wants to expose their critics and, possibly, threaten them with intimidating legal actions in order to silence them. EFF presents two of the 8 "J. Doe" subjects of the sought subpoenas.
• RMC_v_Does/
  directory of info on case of Rural/Metro Corp. v. Jane/John Does, in which a third party attempts to subpoena Yahoo for the true identities of several persons posting to Yahoo message boards with messages critical of Rural/Metro.
• S_Union_v_SW_Gas/
  Directory of documents relating to a case in which Southwest Gas issued a subpoena to online service provider Yahoo! Inc. seeking to have Yahoo reveal the identity and online correspondence of anonymous posters who participated in a public Yahoo! message board discussion concerning Southwest Gas.