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Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.[1]

Definitions

A chat room is

[a]n Internet client that allows users to communicate in real time using typed text, symbols, or audio.[2]
a modern-day analog to yesteryear's telephone party lines and allow individual parties to "talk” to as many as twenty-three other parties at one time.[3]

Overview

[T]wo or more individuals wishing to communicate more immediately can enter a chat room to engage in real-time dialogue — in other words, by typing messages to one another that appear almost immediately on the others' computer screens.[4]

"Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox."[5]

Certain software programs or ISPs provide lists of chat rooms based on areas of interest or topics of discussion. Users may have unrestricted access to these chat rooms or the chat rooms may be restricted by size (number of participants) or password.

Chat sessions may be monitored and logged by the service provider. However, log retention varies depend­ing on the service provider. In chat rooms, a screen name might not be permanently reserved for a specific individual and therefore cannot be relied on to identify a person. Each user in a chat room must have a unique screen name for that session. However, when that individual logs off, that screen name may become available for use by another individual. In addition, different individu­als can use the same screen name at the same time if they are in different chat rooms. Just because the same screen name is seen in a chat room on another occasion does not necessarily mean the same user was using that screen name.

References

  1. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844, 851-52 (1997) (full-text), quoting American Civil Liberties Union v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824, 835 (3d Cir. 1996) (full-text).
  2. Electronic Crime Scene Investigation: A Guide for First Responders, at 51.
  3. Green v. America Online (AOL), 318 F.3d 465, 469 (3d Cir. 2003) (full-text).
  4. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844, 851-52 (1997) (full-text), quoting American Civil Liberties Union v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824, 835 (3d Cir. 1996) (full-text).
  5. Id.

See also

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