The judge has ruled in favour of Richard Warman and ordered that we release this confidential information to Warman and that we pay him over $5,000 in costs.

We are weighing our options at this time but without the funds to appeal it seems most likely that we will have to comply. We must obey the law or we become no better than our political opponents.

This ruling means a number of things. Most importantly it means that anyone can gain access to a Canadian forum owner’s confidential records on its members simply by filing a lawsuit (that could later be dropped) against the forum operator. No forum operater in Canada, and no Canadian blogger who allows the public to post on his blog, can now safely keep any information at all about a website’s members. We highly recommend that Canadian forum operators and bloggers expunge all such records from their files and stop collecting any information that could endanger the anonymity of their posters.

Free Dominion stopped recording the IPs of its members and visitors over a year ago.

There are serious implications for the John Does as well. While it is highly unlikely that an ISP will have records on IPs from that long ago, and if any records do exist the data will have deteriorated to uslessness, any of the John Does might become a target of harrassment by Richard Warman. There is also a very good chance Richard Warman could end up harrassing the wrong people using this faulty data, but that’s the new reality cast by this ruling.

We will keep everybody abreast of events as they unfold. This was only one round, the best is yet to come.