YouTube sued for ‘derogatory’ video by Toronto cop
By IANSSunday, October 17, 2010
TORONTO - Posting online comments or YouTube videos anonymously may soon be over if some recent cases are anything to go by.
A Toronto cop, who was mocked after videos of his actions during the G-20 summit here in June were posted on YouTube, is suing Google for $1.2 million in damages and seeking the identity of user `theforcebewithme’ who posted them and 24 others who made derogatory comments against him.
Nicknamed ‘Officer Bubbles,’ Constable Adam Josephs was filmed by someone during the Toronto protests while threatening a young woman with arrest if she blew bubbles in his face.
One of the comments on the videos reads: “I love the fact that this Nazi’s name is known. I am hoping some unstable Dilaudid addict takes this (expletive) down.”
The cop is seeking legal action against YouTube and those who posted what he calls defamatory comments against him when he was just performing his duty.
The cop’s lawyer was quoted as saying by the Postmedia News, “From our client’s perspective, he was performing his duty as a police officer in what was an extremely volatile time at the summit.” The lawyer said his client’s actions at the summit may be subject to criticism, but the “reaction had this massive backlash that we say is disproportionate and incommensurate to what happened, and started getting to the point where it included threats.”
The videos have since been taken down.
Just this Friday, a supreme court judge in New York ordered Google to give IP addresses of three people who called Columbia Business School graduate and model Carla Franklin a ‘whore’ on YouTube.
In a much more famous case last year, Canadian model Liskula Cohen, who is based in New York, successfully forced Google to reveal the identity of a blogger who posted her pictures and called her a “skanks In NYC.”
The blogger was identified as Rosemary Port whom the model sued for $3 million.
Thomson Reuters, the world’s largest media company, has just announced not to allow anonymous comments on its website.
