Subpoena Squashed
The Friends won a minor victory in the courtroom today as our motion to (s)quash a subpoena was granted by an Orange County Superior Court judge. The subpoena would have compelled us to reveal identifying information of a blog commenter to an Anaheim city employee, who is suing an anonymous John Doe for defamation.
A series of arguments filed just before the hearing centered on the inherent nature of Friends for Fullerton’s Future itself. Is it a business, an unincorporated association, a global shadow conspiracy, or just an Internet domain? The judge didn’t want to go there. And really, who can blame him?
So we won on a technicality and the plaintiff vowed to serve the subpoena again. Outside the courtroom we implored her to focus on the nasty stuff left on other websites and drop the case against FFFF’s comparatively mild missive, leaving it to whither away into Internet nothingness where is just may well belong.
Will she listen? Doubtful. She seems as hardheaded as we are.
Sometimes being hardheaded is good. But usually it just hurts more.
I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that you and Jared Lee were in court on the sane day.
TFW, that’s a stupid thing to write. I have a suggestion, the next time you decide to make a comment, think about what you are trying to say (write) before you click Submit.
Who’s Jared Lee?
Travis, thank you for taking the position you took on this issue.
And man you were awesome in court today 🙂
Jared Loughner is who he means Hollis..FFFF gets their names and facts straight but I suppose the commenters do not have to Seems some of them just throw out comments into the wind and see what sticks!
Pffft. Whatever. My attorney would have countersued her for fifteen quadrillion dollars, too. (And I would have split your single post into a thirty-part series, but that’s why I’m a pro PR guy, and you’re not.)
Congratulations!
The Internet-blog “world” provides real “equal opportunity” for both the commenter to lodge complaints and for the “injured party” to reply and explain-disprove anything false or injurious. If done thoughtfully, the injured or attacked party can advance and overcome the original commenter-heckler’s effort, or at least merely defuse the falsehood.
Our traditional mass communications media has become uniformly Leftist-Socialist-Atheist-Totalitarian (I think that used to be the definition of Communist, before we stopped using words with precision) propagandists, and fortunately the Internet and bloggers have provided a vastly improved media for mass communication.
You folks are doing a great job for our small city and County.