Online Defamation Action Can Have Only One Defendant–Novins v. Cannon
29 04 2010By Eric Goldman
Novins v. Cannon, 3:09-cv-05354-AET -DEA (D. N.J. April 27, 2010). The CMLP page on Novins’ initial demand letter. The CMLP page on the lawsuit. An aborted lawsuit blog putatively by Novins.
This is a defamation action over a USENET post. Doing research for this blog post required me to go back into USENET, a place I haven’t been in years, and I was instantly reminded why I don’t go there any more. Putting aside the signal-to-noise ratio, I simply could not intellectually comprehend most of the posts I saw. It’s like the posts were written for people who live in a parallel English-speaking universe with a very different grammar and logic than mine. Who is still reading and writing this stuff??? And who in the world takes anything in an unmoderated USENET group seriously???
Charles Novins is an attorney. On Feb. 13, 2008, a person using the name Kevin Cannon posted to several USENET groups (apparently, none topical, e.g., alt.culture.alaska) a not-nice-if-untrue post entitled “Law Offices of Charles Novins hires drug addicts to fill your legal needs.”
The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/04/online_defamati.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.
