PUT YOURSELF in Microsoft's place. After battling the DOJ lawsuit and the ILOVEYOU virus, and beating down sixteen-year-olds for setting up Web sites with names like www.windowslover.com, the company's public image has deteriorated to the point that even a TV ad blitz featuring a sweater-clad Bill Gates can't overcome rising distrust. What would you do? Sic lawyers on a popular, grass-roots Web site? Probably not, but that's the latest gambit from Redmond. The conflict that is brewing between Microsoft and the "News for Nerds" site Slashdot is more than just another David-and-Goliath story -- the resolution could altogether delete the idea of on-line anonymity.

Last week, administrators at AndoverNet, the owners of Slashdot, received a lawyerly letter from a J. K. Weston of Microsoft, demanding that Slashdot remove or censor some of the thousands of daily, anonymous posts to the site, posts that contained "unauthorized reproductions of Microsoft's copyrighted work." The letter invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DCMA) and stated that as an ISP, Slashdot was responsible for the content on their servers and potentially liable for damages, even if the text was placed there by shadowy Mister Nobodies.

In an ironic twist, the information in question included specifications for proprietary extensions Microsoft placed in its version of Kerberos, a secure communications protocol (i.e., software that enables passwords to remain secure over networks of Windows-based PCs, Macs and Unix systems) that was previously the poster child for open (non-proprietary) standards. In a textbook example of Microsoft's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy that got the company in such hot water with Java, Microsoft threw secret code into the mix, which prevented Kerberos from working quite right with Unix machines. The fix? Replace the Unix boxes with shiny new Windows 2000 systems. After heat from the tech community, Microsoft agreed to "publish" the specifications for their version in a downloadable document, but to read these specs users had to click on a nondisclosure agreement -- in other words, they could read the details, but couldn't talk about them or, as is the way in the open-source community, roll up their sleeves and fix what they saw as a problem.

The posts on Slashdot copied and pasted the sacrosanct information wholesale, stripping away and defying the NDA. In addition, these public posts stripped the specifications of their "trade-secret" status, as private Scientology documents were stripped of their confidentiality once posted on various Web sites a few years back. In addition, other posts explained how to extract the relevant info without ever seeing the restrictive agreement.

There's no doubt the information is copyrighted, and any instructions on how to extract the information, if provided with the intent of purloining copyrighted material, are also illegal. This is a textbook case of where First Amendment rights defer to property rights. But what to do with the fact that the posters did so anonymously? One of the reasons Slashdot has become such a force in the tech world is its fierce defense of free speech and open standards. Part of that defense lies in allowing anyone to post freely, anonymously. In classic copyright law, Microsoft would have to name in court the individuals against whom it sought an injunction; you can bet that few judges would hand out papers for a "Mr. BlueUnderwear," as one offending poster chose to be known. Under the DMCA, though, if an ISP can't (or won't) identify posters of allegedly copyrighted material, the ISP itself could face injunctions as well as further lawsuits and penalties.

In the words of one legal scholar, this changes the ISP's role from that of a highway, on which anyone can travel, to that of a gatekeeper responsible for those who enter its virtual lanes. Of course, this doesn't dictate that Web sites require users to register with traceable identities; it just puts the sites in a vulnerable position if they don't -- and few could risk a protracted legal battle against the deep pockets in Redmond. Mary Richards once spent a night in jail because she refused to identify a source, but she didn't face a phalanx of Microsoft lawyers. Should Web users be allowed to post anything they damn well please? Could you rightfully post "Fire!" in a crowded chat room? We aren't ready to give up the idea of intellectual property, but the DMCA's ham-handed, someone-must-pay angle is simpleminded at best, especially when speech issues are involved. Worse, it threatens the existence of the sacred, thriving on-line species that Slashdot calls the "Anonymous Coward."