On Thursday, August 14, 2003, at 02:37 PM, Bob Bish wrote:
> For one, e-mail could not possibly hold up as evidence in a court
> of law. It is far too easy to fake.
My organization has been involved in discovery of email from backups in
a number of legal cases. Trust me, it *can* hold up. And then there are
the wall street people who got nailed because they promoted stocks in
public, and wrote emails trashing them. If email can't be used as
evidence, how'd that happen?
> There was an AOL subscriber on one of my lists who was very abusive
> to other list members both on- and off-list. Can I sue AOL because it
> facilitated the abusive communications? Can each member of that list
> also sue AOL? Gee, I don't think so!
can you sue? Yes. Will you win? depends on the situation. But you most
certainly can sue, and if AOL was asked to step in and terminate the
abuse and didn't, you'd likely win. This isn't much different from the
case Verizon was fighting (and lost) over handing over indentification
info to the RIAA. Or the John Doe lawsuits companies file against
anonymous posters in chatrooms to get discovery capability to gain
their identity (see AquaCool vs. Yahoo), or to stop leaking of
confidential information (see Apple vs. "worker bee").
unfortunately, bob, what you wish to be true ain't.
> If this was true there would be no Internet. It would have been
> litigated out of existence years ago. Millions of lawsuits would be
> filed every day.
>
No, but we're headed in that direction.
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