Netherby

0

Before clicking “Send” to ship your latest diatribe off to the online message board, be warned: Your boss may be watching.

A person claiming to be an employee of Thousand Oaks-based Xircom Inc. posted two such messages badmouthing the company, and Xircom is suing him or her.

Xircom, a maker of computer peripherals for laptop computers, filed a $25,000 civil suit in Ventura County Superior Court against “John Doe” over messages posted on Yahoo’s financial site on April 22 and April 12, which officials say divulged proprietary and confidential information about the company.

The messages were posted on the Yahoo site by someone identifying himself only as “A View from Within” and an engineer at the company.

Xircom is seeking to subpoena Yahoo! Inc. (operator of the site) for the identity of the person who posted the messages as part of the lawsuit.

“If it’s an employee (of Xircom), then it’s of great importance,” said Randall Holliday, Xircom’s general counsel.

The lawsuit is not the first of its kind.

“It is somewhat interesting you’ve got a collision between those who believe the Internet is a unique medium with a ‘Wild, Wild West’ mentality in terms of public comment, and others Xircom included who believe the standard rules of libel apply equally to the Internet,” Holliday said. “We believe there are limitations (on what can legally be communicated in online chat rooms).”

Xircom’s position seems to be supported by previous court rulings, according to USC law professor Matthew Spitzer, who specializes in telecommunications law.

Spitzer said that in court, the Internet is treated as any other medium, so defamation and libel rules are applied the same.

“What’s different is that a chat room gets much greater exposure than some other forms of communication,” Spitzer said. “If the person actually did something wrong, damages could be higher, because of the higher exposure.”

The other difference is that the Internet makes it easier to level anonymous complaints about a company, and widely distribute those complaints.

The author of the messages cited in the Xircom lawsuit identifies him/herself “as one who has worked at Xircom for a number of years,” and then proceeds to gripe about various perceived problems with the company and its management.

In the April 12 message, the person claims the company’s RealPort connectors are “extremely fragile and break very easily.”

The April 22 message complains of Xircom’s sales staff, writing that managers “treat the sales prima donnas at Xircom like kings and queens, taking a few of them to Portugal on the company,” and that the sales director is “more concerned with finding his lost hair gel then he is about sales growth.”

Holliday said Xircom regularly monitors message boards about the company. He said these particular messages got the company’s attention because they were posted by someone claiming to be an employee and they contained “nasty comments.”

Message boards and company gripe sites on the Internet are not new. Type in the name of any major company on an Internet search engine and chances are, the results will include gripe sites. But that doesn’t mean that comments made on such sites are necessarily legal, Spitzer said. Companies have many times sued over online comments.

“It’s a way of trying to keep employees in line,” Spitzer said. “Just because you are at a gripe site about Intel, for example, doesn’t give you a license to say bad and untruthful things about the company.”

Holliday said the first step in the Xircom suit is to discover if the author of the messages is indeed an employee. As for what the next step would be after that, he wouldn’t say.

“It’s premature to comment on the next step,” he said. “If it’s an employee, it’s a violation of company policy.”

Spitzer had some cautionary words for those planning to post anonymous chat room messages. Unless it’s political speech, the law doesn’t protect people who post messages anonymously, he said.

“There’s not, in general, a right to make an anonymous statement,” he said. “You can attempt to be anonymous, but you better be successful.”

No posts to display