chilling effect in action

Barbara Bauer has a chilling effect on the speech of those using the website Absolute Write. (She encouraged it to be shut down by threatening legal action.) Barbara Bauer says she is not a scammer, AW says she is, sounds like a case of possible defamation.
from ChillingEffects.org:
"The law of defamation balances two important, and sometimes competing, rights: the right to engage in free speech and the right to be free from untrue attacks on reputation. In practice, the filing or even the threat to file a lawsuit for defamation has sometimes been used as a tool to shut down legitimate comments on the Internet."
To read the FAQ's on defamation, click here.

The ISP's side of the story can be read here. I agree that if the terms of the ISP agreement were violated (bandwith overage) they had the right to shut down the website. I'm not sure about them holding the data hostage for their own court case, though. Couldn't they just make a copy if they need "proof" of someone hating on Barbara Bauer? (I can't comment on the supposed nastiness, I didn't get to read it before the website was taken down.) They didn't want to double the data to copy it. Poor them, they might have to pay for storing something that they want to keep for their own legal benefit!) If I make copies of an article to use as proof in court, I don't charge the publisher to store a copy for me. In fact, if I want a copy of someone else's article, I have to pay for copies and give back the original.

I still think Barbara Bauer is silly for claiming that posting her email is illegal. If an email is part of the public record (such as on her OWN website) she could get spam from there. Just like you get sales calls at home when your phone number is listed in the phonebook. If I grabbed my senator's number out of a public phone book and put it on a flyer urging people to call in about an issue, that is no different from what many grass root campains/causes do every day. How is posting an opinion on a message board and including a way for others to support that cause by responding (publicly listed email) different?

Now here is a big wagging finger (NAUGHTY NAUGHTY!) for any nasty people sending off hate mail. You are just as much of an idiot for sending off poorly thought out and badly written letters to your senator, the editor of the local paper, Barbara Bauer, or anyone else you want to listen to you. Calling them nasty names will not change anything.

As for the ISP, if they have a rule against reposting public info, and want to regulate content beyond blocking what is illegal, I would switch to a different one ASAP. This ISP is suffering from over reaction about what might (not what is) illegal. Below is a snippet of the ISP's response.

Ok now that you have a good idea of what was given freely let’s talk about the email issue with Ms. Bauer. The lady filed a complaint with us in writing; we needed to react in good faith to what we deemed as a possible legal issue for OUR business all that was asked was the email address be removed from the post. Seeing how Ms. Bauer was complaining about receiving spam and hate mail from AW members that commented on that post. At this time I was not sure if the abuse was true but removing the email address was not to much to ask I thought. (Little did I know how cruel the members of this community really were.)

Now I agree that Stephanie should not have posted on the forum this request, my plan was to send an email and if it was not taken off in two hours then I would close the forum and/or site down till the issue was taken care of (that’s my normal procedure for policy violations) Stephanie thought she was protecting the community by getting someone’s attention on the forum and have it done much quicker (this time she was also thinking of our business).

So the email address was removed Ms. Bauer called complaining about the post topic and threatened legal actions I returned her call and set her in her place by telling her she needed to file the proper legal forms against the site owner before we could do anything about the information being shared.

Italics and bold are mine. I read this as "oh, someone called and whined, we weren't even sure if there was a legal issue, so before we even consulted a lawyer, we decided it was a policy violation anyway." Sounds like a chilling effect to me.

I guess if you bitch enough, you can get the little guy who complained about you fired. Whatever happened to "suck it up" or "names can never hurt me"? Yeah yeah I know the legal thing called defamation, but that belongs in a court room. That is a tort, not a criminal violation, and action should not be taken until someone is proven guilty.