While the US courts have been quite good about protecting the anonymity of online commenters, very few other countries feel the same way. However, Roni Evron alerts us to a ruling in Israel that also protects the anonymity of blog commenters, ruling that the site doesn’t need to hand over the IP addresses of commenters:
“The good of online anonymity outweighs the bad, and it must be seen as a byproduct of freedom of speech and the right to privacy.”
The court didn’t necessarily say that commenters could never be revealed, but that courts have to be careful to measure the impact:
Avraham suggested looking at issues such as how extreme the allegedly damaging remarks are, whether the attack was systematic or a one-time phenomenon, and how seriously a reasonable reader would take the comments.
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