Major League Baseball is taking a swing at Internet anonymity.
The league is crying foul at an unnamed online poster who has turned the comments section at MLB.com into a virtual red-light district with profane and sexually-explicit comments and images. In a case that could change the nature of Internet anonymity, MLB wants a judge to force Charter Communications to reveal the identity of the commentator, according to Manhattan Supreme Court papers filed last week.
Since July 2009 the person has posted dozens of “threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, demeaning, offensive, pornographic, profane, sexually explicit, indecent and inappropriate,” the documents said. The offender also used an offensive photo as his online persona, MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman told The Post.
“This crossed the line,” Bowman said of the image, which he declined to describe. “We’re going to see this through, we’re pretty serious about it.”
MLB’s attempts to keep the gross guest away failed because the person used fake personal information, the league said. It wants the user’s real identity so it can go after the person for breaching the site’s terms of use.
Last year, model Liskula Cohen made headlines when she got a court order forcing Google to give her the name of a blogger who anonymously described her as a “first place skank.”
Cohen and other cases involve a single person trying to get the identities of people who had written specifically about them. The MLB case marks a departure from that by trying to go after commenters for behavior that breaks the site’s terms of use.