The ABA Daily News reports:
[Raymond Niro, a] Chicago lawyer who is being criticized, along with his law firm, in an anonymous Internet blog supposedly authored by a fellow attorney has offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who can provide him with the identity of “Troll Tracker.”
I have to admit, I’m a fan of this approach.
I believe that you have a First Amendment right to speak anonymously. I’ve seen any number of unethical abuses of the legal system – engineered to reveal the identity of an anonymous speaker. I’ve seen even more that were plain stupid.
Mr. Niro, on the other hand, didn’t send a bogus DMCA notice. He didn’t file a specious copyright claim in order to pull a garden variety defamation suit into federal court. He didn’t try and overcome Section 230. He probably calculated the amount of money and time such an effort would take and simply privatized the investigation.
The only downside I can see is if the person claiming the bounty had any kind of a confidentiality agreement with “Troll Tracker,” then “Mr. Tracker” may have a cause of action against his (or her) Judas.
In the “unintended consequences” department — it looks like the bounty has catapulted Patent Troll Tracker’s traffic to new heights. I had previously never heard of this blawg. He’s now the #1 for the day, #1 for the week, and #4 for the month in overall popularity on the ABA site.
