It's probably !HN, but I'd be interested in how many people read this as "Guess based on simulations forces Google to reveal..." versus how many read it as "Person paid (well) to wear clothes (barely) forces Google to reveal..."
Of course you'll get loads of frivolous lawsuits as well...
This way many people are afraid to publish articles that might be controversial. Some already have been attacked by fascists or been shut up by lawyers.
Not to mention China of course where blog publishers have to register with authorities.
When they operate a blog or website on their own they also have to publish a so called imprint including an address (which might be an office address though).
Journalists and everybody else working from home have no choice for their sites and blogs.
Anonymous insults and defamation don't have nearly as much power as the scenario above.
I live in a country where a government meeting transcripts were leaked, and on their way passed through a regular joe. He got detained, his computer confiscated, and most scary, two years after the incident I still couldn't find the transcripts online. The incident was widely publicized - but the files were still gone. (I'm from Romania btw, an ex-communist country. You'd think we'd know better.)
And more to the point, wikileaks would be impossible.
Doesn't it get to a point where you can't solve any problems because of the other systems they're tied to?
How about we just agree from a moral perspective that:
1. Anonymous defamation etc. is cowardly and should be persecuted appropriately.
2. Maintaining reasonable privacy is something we should strive for, and that it should be just as important as #1.
3. A legal system needs to be in place that we can trust to maintain both #1 and #2.
Those are our requirements. Now I'm not saying we're going to solve it right here and now, but thinking about it this way, as a problem requiring a solution and not a big wall we can't get past, definitely isn't going to hurt.
The Manhattan court is a skank.
The court, in this case, required that they show evidence of libel (which they did) before compelling google to hand over the blogger. I think this ruling is an outstanding one. Speech can be damaging, and folks who engage in libelous or slanderous speech deserve what they get.
If I claim someone is a drug-addled buffoon, that may be defaming, if that person is Ozzy Osbourne, then his corpus of work speaks directly to that conclusion and only the most highly paid lawyers would bother to argue that description defamed him.