Property and speech: who owns what you say in cyberspace?

Blown Cover. February 1, 1995, Helsinki, Finland. Finnish police present Johan (Julf) Helsingius with a warrant demanding he provide them with the true name of the person who has been using his well-known anonymity server, anon.penet.fi, to conceal his identity when posting to the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology. The user, subsequently revealed as Dennis Erlich, was a former Scientology minister who had been quoting Scientological scriptures in postings harshly critical of church practices. When Helsingius refused, he was told that failure to comply with the warrant would result in the confiscation of his system and the consequent revelation to authorities of the actual identities of 200,000 people from all over the world, many of them politically criminal by their local standards, who had used the server during its two-and-ahalf years online. On February 8, rather than endanger the lives of the strangers who trusted him, Helsingius complied. At that moment, cyberspace lost some unmeasurable but large amount of its ability to be a place where anybody, anywhere, could speak his or her mind without fear of retribution. No longer could one be sure that John Perry Barlow