Blog Of War

[July 2nd, 2008]

Note to bloggers: Those rants you’ve been posting as “PDXFemme” or “BatBoy68” could get you hauled into court.

Ian Hale Garner, a gun enthusiast from central Oregon, is facing a federal lawsuit by a Georgia-based weapons manufacturer for anonymous comments he posted this spring in an online chat room.

The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Portland brings to Oregon a battle being fought around the country over the limits of free speech online. Bloggers elsewhere have been sued with mixed results for criticizing real-estate companies, writing negative book reviews and even disparaging Apple computers.

“There are free-speech issues we believe are part and parcel to the underlying dispute,” says Garner’s attorney, Michael McGean of Bend.

Garner, 30, claimed online that he’d heard silencers made by Advanced Armament Corporation produced inaccurate shots. He also alleged that an arms manufacturer had severed its contract with Advanced Armament over personal conflicts with the owners.

The company says the comments are false and the lawsuit seeks $200,000 for damage to its reputation.

The lawsuit claims Garner posted the comments as “ian187” and other nicknames in chat rooms on the websites AR15.com and SilencerResearch.com. Both sites are geared toward gun aficionados and the weapons industry.

“This case illustrates the worst of the Internet, in that a person sitting in Redmond, Ore., can destroy a company’s client or customer relationship through the click of a mouse,” says Michael Seidl, Advanced Armament’s Portland attorney. “The damage is impossible to quantify when a false rumor is spread.”

Seidl says Garner posted his comments where they could do maximum damage: chat rooms populated by people involved in the weapons industry. He says it wasn’t difficult to learn the identity of ian187 because Garner had registered with the chat rooms under his own name.

The federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 shields website owners from liability for content posted by users, making user-generated Web 2.0 sites like Craigslist and MySpace possible. But the law leaves the door open for claims against individuals who use the Web to post defamatory comments.

Seidl says the gauge for whether Garner slandered Advanced Armament is the same as everywhere else: If the comments were false and they harmed Advanced Armament, then Garner should be held liable.

McGean agrees the same standards apply to the Web, but he says what his client posted was true. He filed a motion June 4 asking U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin to dismiss the case. Coffin has not yet ruled on the motion.

“There are many lawsuits that are filed by plaintiffs who are simply interested in quashing any kind of public criticism,” McGean says. “The objective is not to prevail (in court) but to bully the person into shutting up. And we feel that’s what is really going on here.”