There seems to be a pattern forming: utter a discouraging word about a corporation on a national online service, and you may be invited by an out-of-state judge for a friendly courtroom visit. To those who file suit, it's irrelevant whether or not the defendant ever set foot in the court's state. The deed was comitted on the state's telephone lines, and that's enough.
In separate incidents, two participants in the Money Talks discussion area on Prodigy were hauled into out-of-state courts. Each allegedly damaged the stock value of a publicly traded medical-device company through badmouthing. Peter DeNigris of New York, was sued in New Jersey, by a New Jersey company called Medphone. A. Karl Kipke, a resident of Kansas, was sued in Portland, Oregon, by a company there named Epitope.
You don't have to lurk on a big-time national service like Prodigy to be sued out of state, though. Recently, the owners of the Amateur Action computer bulletin board, in Milpitas, California, were convicted on obscenity charges in Tennessee. It was bad enough that they were forced to defend themselves from 2,000 miles away (over objections that the recently enacted NAFTA treaty protected against such remote jurisdiction), but Tennessee's relatively conservative local community standards were applied in deciding whether Amateur Action's online offerings were obscene. If other courts follow this precedent, small, conservative morality zones could dictate the legal availablity of online information in communities across the country.
Luckily, there is one court decision pointing the other way, limiting out-of-state jurisdiction on the infobahn. In CompuServe v. Patterson, CompuServe Incorporated sued Richard Patterson, a Texas resident, in federal court in Columbus, Ohio (CompuServe's backyard). Patterson, not entirely intrigued with the commute to Columbus, filed an early motion to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction, and - surprise! - it was granted by the court.
The judge recognized that the use of an online service with national coverage does not automatically make the user liable in lawsuits from every state of the union, saying: "It appears that the customer's primary interest is in the information contained on the network, much of which may come from other CompuServe users in states other than Ohio." The judge even declined to simply transfer the case to a Texas court with the proper jurisdiction, although federal courts have that option - it was more important to dismiss a case in Ohio against a guy who never even set foot there.
Will CompuServe v. Patterson mark the beginning of a trend limiting remote jurisdiction over netizens? Probably not. Local courts protect local citizenry and institutions, and many will continue to extend that protection against long-distance interlopers. This issue may not be put to rest until the big guns, the US Congress or the Supreme Court, finally step into the ring.
ELECTRIC WORD
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