EFF Defends Anti-Troll Bloggers Sued by Lawyer

The EFF is a group squarely among the good guys in my book and they do a great deal of positive work in helping to maintain our freedoms in a period where that isn't something we can take for granted.

Imagine, things we say on ATS often enough, leading to a demand for 2 years of IP's representing every user that has been here. Even if the right to know who said this in particular is thought reasonable by some, the over-reach here is unbelievable.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in to defend bloggers in two defamation lawsuits filed by an attorney whose firm they blasted online as a copyright troll.

Bloggers on DieTrollDie.com and FightCopyrightTrolls.com accuse Paul Duffy and his copyright law firm, Prenda Law, of "trolling" for copyright infringement by targeting large groups of internet users for downloading files, then discovering their identities and forcing a settlement under the threat of massive copyright damages.

Days after filing suit, Prenda Law subpoenaed Automattic Inc., the company that owns the WordPress blogging platform, seeking the IP addresses of everyone who accessed either blog in the last two years.

"Our client is requesting all Internet Protocol addresses (including the date and time of that access in Universal Coordinated Time) that accessed the blogs located at dietrolldie.com and fightcopyrighttrolls.com between January 1, 2011 through the present," the subpoena states. "Please provide this information in an Excel spreadsheet." (Parentheses in original.)

Source

Holy Privacy Stomp, Batman! That's just asking TOO much for anything in my opinion.

(I'm supposed to be keeping years of activity logs on my sites? Sounds like it's expected. Oops.... Gee.. Didn't know that. )

Sounds like the actions of Prenda Law are proving the accusations of the EFF. I can see it no other way.

Did you say logs? I thought you said "format"... my bad.

reply to post by Hefficide

Do these Government and Attorney types think disk space grows on trees or something? Here I thought I was being a good housekeeper by erasing all those pesky log files in automated tasks every week.

Sounds like efficiency might get me in trouble some day. Awww.. What a choice.

Always use a proxy or proxy network when logging onto ze internets.