In the Liskula Cohen “NYC skank” case, Cohen successfully sued Blogger to get them to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who had defamed her by calling her (inter alia) “skankiest in NYC”.
Now we’ve apparently had a similar case in Australia. Self-help guru Jamie McIntyre launched the action in September this year after an anonymous blogger labelled him a “thieving scumbag”:
Mr McIntyre believes Google Australia is the only Australian company that knows who’s behind jamiemcintyreexposed.com because of its paid advertising relationship with the website, the application says.
The allegedly defamatory website is one of the first listings on a Google search for Mr McIntyre and countless efforts to find the owners, including hiring a private investigator, have been unsuccessful.
The Courier-Mail yesterday reported that McIntyre had been successful in his action, and that Google would be ordered to disclose the identity of the blogger.
There had apparently been an attempt last year to sue Google in respect of an allegedly discriminatory blog, but the action failed: see Gluyas v Google Inc (Anti-Discrimination) [2010] VCAT 540. The issue in that case was not the anonymity of the blogger, nor was the case brought in defamation. Mr Gluyas was a man who suffered from a form of autism, Asperger’s syndrome. He attempted to sue Google to force it to remove a blog called “hatingautism.com” which he alleged was discriminatory towards people who had autism. The blog had also allegedly named Mr Gluyas and reproduced certain of his own blog posts. The author of the blog was Mr John Best Jr of Londonderry, New Hampshire in the United States. Mr Gluyas brought his action before VCAT under the Equal Opportunity Act, and the VCAT Member said that the Equal Opportunity Act was not intended to regulate behaviour which occurred outside Victoria. In addition, the case could be distinguished from Dow Jones & Company Inc v Gutnick (2002) 210 CLR 575 because Google merely passively supplied a platform for the blogger to publish upon; it did not publish the material itself.
I suspect this will be a burgeoning area of interest as people attempt to regulate what is said about them online.
