Pic: CafePress
A few months ago, Yahoo (if the Ninth Circuit doesn’t use the exclamation mark, we’re not going to, either) was embroiled in an ugly discrimination suit filed by one of its lawyers, Eulonda Skyles. As we previously wrote, leaks in that case played a part in the resignation of the former head of Yahoo’s PR department, Jill Nash.
At the center of the complaint was Skyles’s allegation that
she was passed over for promotions and relegated to employee slip-and-fall-type cases instead of the big-ticket litigation she had worked on before having a kid, until she left (says Yahoo) or was fired (says Skyles) in 2007.
Turns out, one of the big-ticket cases she worked on was just the subject of a Ninth Circuit opinion that is being applauded by bloggers and other free-speech advocates.
The details, after the jump.
The case is Barnes v. Yahoo, No. 05-36189, and involves a classy young man, fake profiles, salacious emails, and lackadaisical customer support.
Cecilia Barnes broke up with her boyfriend, who then took the morally higher road of creating a bunch of fake personal profiles for Barnes on various Yahoo websites, mostly of the “For a good time call” variety. She was then inundated with lascivious contacts (including some in person, apparently). She did everything Yahoo asked to get the profiles taken down, to no avail. The day before a story was going to run on a local news program, a woman identifying herself as Ms. Osako, Yahoo’s director of communications, called Barnes and had Barnes send in all the information again. Osako said she would “personally walk the statements over to the division responsible for stopping unauthorized profiles and they would take care of it.”
Of course, nothing happened and the profiles remained. Then, magically,
Approximately two months passed without word from Yahoo, at which point Barnes filed this lawsuit against Yahoo in Oregon state court. Shortly thereafter, the profiles disappeared from Yahoo’s website, apparently never to return.
Imagine that, the head of PR can’t get anything done, but the law department can. It almost makes you wonder whether they would have been better off continuing to not do anything – they just proved that it was possible to get the harassing material down quickly. Nonetheless, the Communications Decency Act exculpated Yahoo from statutory liability for failure to take the material down.
Ars Technica summarizes the holding:
Bottom line: Yahoo had no real responsibility to remove the profiles, though once it promised to do so, it may have created a contract-based claim that could result in liability.
Even though Barnes may have other paths to recovery, BNA calls the result, which is protective of publishers, “a nice win” and “a great case.”
Back to Eulonda Skyles, though. This must have been one of the last substantive matters she worked on: she and inhouse colleague Reginald Davis were “also on the brief.”
WilmerHale’s Patrick Carome (BC BA ’80, Harvard JD ’83) argued the case and was on the brief with partner Samir Jain (Stanford BS ’91, Harvard JD ’94) and former associate Colin Rushing (James Madison BA ’95, UVA JD ’99), who has since gone inhouse at SoundExchange, an entity that, unlike the Barnes decision, is not at all popular with bloggers.
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