Public records are public, you know.
— you cannot walk up into a courthouse and walk out with a copy of every single public document, even at cost. They simply won’t let you do it. There should always be some cost to obtaining this data, even if it’s merely just walking down to the courthouse and getting a free copy. If there is no cost, it will be abused. I have a stack of unsolicited junk mail every month to prove it, some of which are clearly scams (ranging from Nigerian scams to solicitations designed to look like bills). People working on controversial or high stakes cases get threats. The damage it causes society outweighs the benefits.

It’s way too easy to defame someone with total immunity on these sites. … That’s simply not true. The party doing the defaming still has liability. There’s no immunity for the defaming party. You seem to be confusing the service provider with the party doing the defaming.
— I’m not confusing anyone. There are plenty of cases where the judge has said that for one reason or another, the person making the false statement gets to stay anonymous, which means the case is over. The law is far from developed in this area.

It’s so easy to pay people to rank down opponents and rank up in-house counsel. … If that were true, the site wouldn’t be useful and wouldn’t last very long.
— your argument is marginal. Every few month, there’s another marketing rep in the news after getting caught for paying for fake reviews. Besides, anyone doing it will make sure it blends in with the rest of the material.

4) Certain sites like these have horrible reputations for attempting to extort whoever is being rated. … Do you have any evidence that Avvo is doing this, or are you spreading false rumors with no evidence?
— How am I “spreading false rumors with no evidence”? I never said Avvo did this. You did. I said that sites LIKE Avvo (particularly Yelp) are in the news repeatedly for this. As I said in the first line of my original post, I’m not against Avvo specifically. I’m against these anonymous meta-review sites which don’t acknowledge their weaknesses, and then try to play the victim in the media when someone points out those weaknesses.

47 USC 230 and all the cases interpreting it REALLY screw anyone who is defamed online … That’s a rather astounding statement. The purpose of 47 USC 230 is quite clear and admirable: it’s to place liability on the party actually liable for the defamatory statements. To be honest, I think that we shouldn’t even need 230 because it should be common sense. The desire of folks like yourself to put liability on a 3rd party just because you have trouble identifying the actually guilty party is really rather disturbing.
— If you set up a system knowing that it has a gaping weakness, and continue to let people exploit that weakness to violate the law, particularly after the victims of those violations have pointed out the weakness in your system, you should also be held liable when you continue to allow your system’s weakness to be further exploited. The problem is exacerbated by websites which refuse to keep logs in accordance with discovery guidelines (which are typically 2 years, although many sites claim not to keep logs for even 60 days, which having worked as an IT admin, I know is bull). Or some judge decides that for some obtuse reason or another, one should have a right to anonymity on the internet, even if their statements were 100% false. If you look at the cases, a lot of them are split on the rationale. I wouldn’t have a problem if some of these judges in the subpoena cases considered the allegations on the merits. Basically, the judge should take the complaint, and ask whether the facts regarding the false statements, if proven true, would state a prima facie case of defamation. Once that has been determined, the identity should be exposed. Some judges disagree.

Sites that have unauthenticated posting become breeding grounds to defame people. Look at something like Facebook — no one is defaming anyone there because everyone is readily identifiable. … So you are saying you have no respect for the right to anonymity, which is regularly supported by the courts and basic American history. The Federalist Papers apparently should have been illegal based on your reasoning? I’m glad we live in a country that feels differently.
— Once again, you’re twisting my words greatly. You unreasonably infer this all-or-nothing approach into my logic which simply isn’t so. I’m just saying that when sites purposely have little or no authentication, they know that they have this weakness, and they defend the stance of having this weakness, they’re going overboard. Your right to anonymity does not allow you to break the law in public. In fact, most states have additional crimes along the lines of “wearing a mask or disguise during the commission of a crime.” If you rob a bank, you get one sentence, and if you rob a bank with a mask on, you get a higher sentence. You never have a right to make false statements about someone, and anonymity isn’t some magical trump card that allows you to do it either.

Because Avvo doesn’t check with any legal documents that an attorney actually represented someone, it’s so easy to falsely rank down the competition and rank up allied counsel. … As noted elsewhere, Avvo rankings are not based on reviews, but on a variety of things.
— but they still leave the text commentary where people are free to defame an attorney all they want. Even then, the algorithm argument is silly. Most settlements and licenses have confidential terms, so those won’t be included. Corporate defense is rarely a question of whether liability exists, but more of a question of how much the damages will be. Criminal defense is similar in that most charged defendants end up with a guilty verdict, but the gauge of skill is generally how much the defendant pled out to under the weight of the evidence. And going by case volume is also worthless. Many of the best attorneys try 1 case every 5 years, whereas the guys working traffic cases have a revolving door. I would love to assign numerics to all the factors involved (my undergrad degree was in applied mathematics), but with all the confidential information, there’s no way you can get an accurate gauge here.

And finally, you have the sites that outright attempt to extort those who have bad information posted on the site. … Do you have any evidence that Avvo does this, or did you just make false statements accusing Avvo of unethical behavior that it does not do?
— (I don’t know why you felt the need to twist my words… again). Look back up at my original comment. I never said that Avvo tried to extort any attorneys. It is this class of meta-review sites LIKE Avvo that have repeatedly been accused of this (Yelp is the worst offender).

Usually the techdirt commentary isn’t too bad, but this time, you either misunderstood my statements or outright twisted them purposely. I know you guys are all about the “alternative business models” and how big content should switch their model instead of going after a making available right in copyright. But what happens when someone starts defaming you and all you have is his IP address? If the “IP != a person” argument trumps all (which I hate to tell you, it doesn’t — facts in civil trials need only be proven by >50%, which is far from 100%), then the only remedy when someone defames you is to get a name change or change your trademark. The law seeks to enforce reasonable behavior. Is it reasonable that someone sets up a site with reckless disregard for defamation, and when people are defamed on the site, the operators refuse to cooperate, especially when the operators are profiting off of this unlawful content being posted? Of course not. That’s patently absurd.

Regardless, neither you, nor Avvo’s GC who posted here addressed the fact that’s unique to attorney’s situations. Attorneys can only divulge their former client’s confidences in rare situations.

Think about it — if someone made a Rate-a-Consultant site which is now getting 1m+ uniques/mo, and one of their users claimed you ripped them off, stole money from them, attempted to walk out with copies of their source code and databases, and you sexually harassed the females who work there, you’d be pretty pissed. Now you send Rate-a-Consultant a nastygram saying that it’s not true. They respond that they don’t save their logs at all, and they’re not going to take it down. Should they be able to continue to profit from this ongoing defamation? No way; you’d want that ridiculous review gone as fast as possible.