Brave New Cyberworld

By Dana Gentry

Thursday, June 4, 2009 | 1:55 p.m.

First Amendment champion Dominic Gentile - out to tamp free speech? As Jon asks at the beginning of today's program, "Are we in some parallel universe?"

Media law experts, news organizations and their Web site editors are navigating (some more carefully than others) the vast unknowns of Cyberspace, a place where anonymous message posters purge themselves of all manner of vile substance and, once in awhile, a pearl of wisdom.

In order to glean those pearls and protect a right our forefathers deemed important enough to put first in the Bill of Rights, lawmakers and courts will be challenged to grapple with questions posed in just the last decade.

Are newspapers and television stations obligated to monitor the content on their message boards?

What obligation do those organizations have to provide identifying information about posters to plaintiffs alleging libel? And does failure to identify an offending poster constitute participation in a conspiracy on the part of the news outlet?

Those are just a few of the questions raised by a lawsuit filed by Gentile on behalf of the owners of a local business who claim they were libeled by a Channel 13 message board poster identified only as "Jacob."

Gentile explains why, at least for now, the lawsuit names the phantom "Jacob" but not Channel 13.

Fascinating stuff for legal minds, media types and message board posters.