Paul Alan Levy (Public Citizen) and Oliver Edwards are defending against the claims (in Joe Johnson v. Think Computer Corp.) on behalf of PlainSite's operator (Think Computer Corp.); an excerpt (and I'll also excerpt Johnson's counterarguments when they're filed):
The plaintiff is a prolific pro se litigant who has been criticized for frivolous litigation by several judges among the many who have presided over the many pro se lawsuits that he has filed in the past three decades. In this case, he sues to challenge a website that hosts judicial records from thousands of lawsuits across the county, because the website includes information about his civil and criminal litigation history, including information that the plaintiff himself placed in public records when he filed papers in his lawsuits, including the name, address, telephone number and email address of his representative in court: himself.
The plaintiff first wrote to the defendant Think Computer Corporation in 2016, threatening to file suit if it did not take down the records of one lawsuit, and warning that if this request were not honored, "[Y]ou will be subject to a civil lawsuit, and will be tied up in litigation for the next year or so litigating this issue." The plaintiff also threatened to sue defendant's owner personally, even to embroil the owner's parents into the matter.
However, the First Amendment and Article 40 of the Maryland Declaration of Rights protect the public's right of access to judicial records, and protect Think Computer's right to assist the public with access to those records. All the legal claims are subject to dismissal. Moreover, their utter lack of merit, coupled with the plaintiff's repeated threats to impose the cost and trouble of litigation on Think Computer, its owner and even the owner's parents, show bad faith that warrants invocation of Maryland's anti-SLAPP law to support immediate dismissal of this action with prejudice….
[B]ecause judges addressing his litigation have discussed Johnson's name and contact information in the course of resolving motions in his cases, that information appears in online judicial dockets for his cases, and on privately-operated sites that host the same information for the convenience of members of the public. Inspection of the PlainSite website reveals that, with one exception, the only identifying information about plaintiff is his name, address, telephone number and email address.
The decision cited above from a federal judge in Pennsylvania specifies Johnson's birth date, a key part of the reasoning of that decision because the date was needed to disambiguate Johnson from others with the same name, which was an issue in his criminal prosecution there. The federal court docket in that case, which is available on PlainSite as well as the federal courts' PACER system and CourtListener does not reveal any filing by Johnson seeking to have his birth date redacted from the opinion. Johnson did file a motion to seal all the records in that criminal case, which was denied.
