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U.S.: Part of CDA well and alive?

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/yr/mo/cyber/cyberlaw/21law.html

April 21, 2000

By CARL S. KAPLAN

Suit Against Anonymous Pest Revives Online Speech Law

little-known federal law restricting indecent speech online that many lawyers thought was essentially dead has come back to life in Federal District Court in Manhattan, to the chagrin of some civil libertarians.

The law, an attempt to refurbish for the Internet age some older statutes banning harassing phone calls, outlaws the use of a telecommunications device, like a computer modem, to transmit comments that are "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent" when the intent is "to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person."

It is a small surviving part -- section 223(a)(1)(A) -- of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Two other better-known CDA provisions, which would have banned the online transmission of indecent speech to minors, were struck down by the United States Supreme Court as violations of the First Amendment in a landmark decision in 1997.

Earlier this month, in what may be the first lawsuit of its kind, lawyers for an Internet company invoked the remaining part of the act in a suit against a persistent pest.

In papers filed on April 11, New York-based About.com said that an unknown person had been invading many of the company's chat rooms since November 1999, including the alcoholism, dating and rodeo rooms -- and, while impersonating the identities of regular chatters, had flooded the rooms with "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy and indecent messages through interstate communications with the intent to annoy, abuse, threaten and harass other people."

Because the company does not know the visitor's name, it sued the unknown computer user who left behind a specific set of IP addresses, the electronic footprints left on a Web server by any visitor to a site. These can often be traced back to an Internet service provider. [...]

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