Lawyer wants IP of a forum poster

[relicx]

I received a letter from a lawyer requesting IP of a user who made potentially libelous forum post about some person. The post was quickly edited by a moderator, but the letter cited the original message. My forum does not have a privacy policy in place. Has anybody ever had a similar issue? How did you handle it?

[dotancohen]

He's a lawyer- play his game. His request will require human intervention, which is allocated by the hour. One hour times $65 an hour plus $25 set up fee. Either you'll make $80 or he'll go away. Arguing with you is not worth his time, nor is getting a warrent- they'll both cost him more than $80.

[Rosalind]

The post was quickly edited, which should cover you for your part of the liability in this case. I don't believe you're under any obligation to provide an IP address, but that might depend on where you are in the world.

Libel is a big issue on forums, you can guarantee it will eventually come up once you get busy enough. My position is not to allow posters to discuss particular companies and websites if at all possible. It's drastic, but libel can be expensive if you don't deal with it well.

The best thing you can do to prevent problems is be vigilant and educate your members. Some of them may not even realise that libel action can be taken against them or you for their forum posts.

What action have you taken against the member? Was it a written warning, a ban, anything like that? The trouble, from your perspective, is that this is just an allegation of libel. There's no way you have the time, as a webmaster, to get to the bottom of the issue and discover which one is telling the truth. So don't take sides and give up the IP unless the police or courts ask you to.

[linear]

I never understood why so many people persist in the belief that IP addresses correspond to people. There are common, even likely scenarios where the relationship is one-to-many (dialup pools, proxy farms) or many to one (NAT groups, public kiosk machines). IP address is just a piece of information in a header on a packet.

Even in a managed corporate network, when I'd get a request to pull "Bob's firewall log" I'd stress to the requesting party that this log reflects connections made from the machine adminstratatively associated with Bob. No one can conclusively assert it was Bob who made any given request, but if there's a pattern of requests over a long period, you're free to draw certain conclusions yourself about the likelihood of it being someone else at Bob's machine.

Of course, the poster's IP was 127.0.0.1, wasn't it? ;)

[rogerd]

This isn't legal advice... but personally, I'd wait for a court order before disclosing IP info to a third party. Quick removal is the way to go with this kind of situation, and it sounds like you handled that part.

IP info isn't always useless - sometimes it leads back to a home connection, a business or a school, etc. In conjunction with the time of the post, it may be possible for the ISP or network administrator to identify the PC or user that made the post.

[wmuser]

dotancohen has pointed out some nice points or simply wait for court decision if you are too concerned about your users privacy