I was gonna say lifehacker isn't the same anymore for me. But I guess they do have all that content from so long ago others may not have experienced... And the latest stuff isn't so bad. There was a time I just stopped visiting because it was product placement and almost zero new information week after week.
Partially joking, I think the US Press gains further distance from Tabloid muck-racking. I'm not a trained Journalist or identify as one (different type of writing). But, in my mind, there's a "newsworthiness" level of integrity that is a pre-requisite for breaking open something that was otherwise private or hidden. This was not one of those instances IMO.
A billionaire used his money and influence to destroy an organization because he doesn't agree with what they say. I can think of at least one thing of value that was lost.
The real issue is that money shouldn't play as much a role in court as it does. Many other problems discussed here like billionaires buying influence are really just corollaries to that.
Law suits occasionally come to incorrect results (the appellate process exists to mitigate this risk, and the higher burden of proof in certain cases, notably criminal cases, exists to direct which side those errors tend to fall on), punishing people who are within the bounds of law and common decency.
Therefore, a deep pockets agent funding every potential lawsuit from other parties they can find (or stimulate), increasing the number of such suits and the likelihood that they will go to trial, can, simply by taking enough swings, eventually impose a combination of legal costs and judgements that will financially destroy the target; actual unlawful behavior may reduce the time it takes for this strategy to succeed, but isn't necessary for it to work.
So, given Theil's demonstrated proclivities in the multiple lawsuits he was funding against Gawker, I don't think the statement that Gawker would have been okay if they had stayed within the law is warranted.
Some context, for those who haven't been following:
- Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker[1]
- Hulk Hogan awarded payout over Gawker sex tapes[2]
- $115M verdict in Hulk Hogan sex-tape lawsuit could wipe out Gawker[3]
News flash: Peter Thiel does something productive with a lot of money. (This isn't the first time, but it's still newsworthy when it happens. In no small part, because it doesn't always work.)
- Peter Thiel is a hard-core activist for individual rights, including freedom of speech
Thiel is pro-freedom when it suits him and anti-freedom when it doesn't. In my opinion, he has lobbied for a world where journalists can "out" people, and now he's taking revenge when it happens to harm him.
So just like any typical self-proclaimed libertarian, who is completely unaware of all the government benefits and protections they are allowed to have because it exists?
No, because the liabilities are getting discharged with the results of the sale. Essentially, Gawker isn't selling itself. Gawker is essentially exchanging itself for the liabilities to their creditors, and the creditors are then selling it in lieu of Gawker paying their debts.
Really simplified example: suppose you're 12, you own a lemonade stand, and you owe your dad $200 (secured against the lemonade stand). It's not going well, so you go through bankruptcy - dad now owns the lemonade stand, you no longer owe dad any money, and he goes and sells it for whatever he can get (say, $100). $100 is a sensible bid for the stand because the debt to the kid's dad has already been discharged.
Messed up lawsuit and I actually don't know what to think.
1) Gawker was garbage dwelling story makers. I am glad they aren't going to do stories anymore.
2) Who will it be the next time something happens like this will it be a actual journalist and good content producer that gets sued to death? Scared for journalist????
Also would be nice to see LifeHacker survive this.
I like Lifehacker and Jalopnik (except for their political posts). I used to like Gizmodo years ago, but they got too political for my taste back then. It would be nice to see Lifehacker and Jalopnik survive.
I also like The Consumerist, but it was sold off to Consumer Reports and was doing okay until it was hacked. Now it's only a shell of its former self. What really made that site was the user contributions, but that died off after they closed the comments after the attack.
Well the hope is that the courts wouldn't rule against an actual journalist for doing his/her job in a lawsuit. I get the "slippery slope" argument but posting a video of Hulk Hogan having sex (taken and posted without his consent) doesn't really qualify as journalism in any way and they really deserved to lose.
But they weren't the only ones and I don't think they were even the first ones to do so. (At work no way I am researching if I am right) I HATE GAWKER but it does seem strange that no one else was sued for this.
Gawker appealed the injunction, and Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal issued an immediate stay, which prevented the injunction from going into effect. Eight months later, the appeals court issued a scathing opinion that overturned Campbell’s order on the grounds that the video was newsworthy and Gawker's publication of it was protected by the First Amendment.
Armed with the appeals court decision, Gawker went back to Campbell and asked her to dismiss the case, since the appeals court had just ruled that publishing the video was protected by the First Amendment. Campbell refused.
The court doesn't even have to rule against the journalist for the legal costs to destroy a media organisation. By example, this exact thing happened to Mother Jones:
Still wouldn't work. The loser wouldn't pay until the case is closed, and the company could go bankrupt in the meantime. Case in point, Gawker is widely expected to have their damages reduced on appeal, but it's already too late.
Legal fees are incredibly high right now partly because of frivolous lawsuits. Loser pays would drive down costs making bankruptcy a lot less likely. Besides, if this had been a pure 1st Amendment case, deep pockets like the ACLU could act like an insurance policy and pick up some of the day-to-day expenses, but the savings from not continuously defending yourself against frivolous lawsuits and getting reimbursed when you win would reduce the need for outside assistance.
Nothing is capped. Because of the potential for paying twice as much to sue someone, only cases where the plaintiff has a good chance of winning make it to court, thereby putting less demand on legal services. Gawker was not bankrupted by their own legal fees, but by the damages they were ordered to pay out of their own pockets, so nothing is justifying a cap on what the loser must pay in terms of legal fees here. The main point of bringing up loser pays is to reduce the chance that a lawsuit with no chance of winning can bankrupt someone such as Mother Jones.
I don't understand #2 (and I've heard it a lot). Theil with all his money was unable to sue/destroy them for a decade even with their despicable behaviour. It wasn't until they did something illegal (the Hogan case) that they went down. Is there really risk for journalists who don't break privacy laws?
1) Why do you think that Gawker will shut down? Someone will buy it at the auction and they have all reasons to continue to publish, maybe with better legal advice. It's still a valuable media property.
Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy Friday and the company will be put up for auction after a judge ruled that a $140 million jury judgment against it in a costly legal battle with former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan would stand.
The sale auction will begin with an opening bid of $100 million from the digital media company and publisher Ziff Davis LLC, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The sale was triggered after the judge overseeing the invasion-of-privacy case brought by Hulk Hogan—whose real name is Terry Bollea—declined to issue a stay pending Gawker’s appeal.
Proceeds from a sale will go into a fund to finance further litigation costs and cover whatever damages may ultimately be leveled following the appeals process, which could take years to resolve.
Two weeks ago, it emerged that Silicon Valley billionaire and investor Peter Thiel has been financing Mr. Bollea’s legal fight and other such battles involving people who Mr. Thiel feels have been targeted unfairly by the media company.
Also, sites like Gawker benefit from encouraging the most base aspects of our culture. Seeing one head of the hydra getting chopped off isn't really progress, but it is satisfying.
Gossip rags come and go. As long as there are celebrities there will be celebrity tabloids.
Privately funding a lawsuit for someone else so you can settle a grudge is ethically dubious, at best.
The American system of allowing juries instead of judges to set reward amounts only ultimately benefits overpaid lawyers, and society as a whole is worse off from the damages of frivolous lawsuits.
That's all I think there really is to say about that...
The jury is the closest thing to a direct democracy America has.
Judges can be corrupted. The jury is basically a direct poll of 12 average Americans. Its known that the court system is imperfect, but juries serve as a restraint on otherwise powerful judges.
If you have the power to corrupt the justice system or even tip the balance - just because of the money you have - would you? There's your ethics problem.
Did Thiel corrupt the justice system? Did he tip the balance the wrong way? Would it have been "right" for Hulk Hogan to have to take on the significantly more wealthy Gawker all by himself?
In the end though, I feel that this really has very little to do with the justice system. It was only a vehicle Thiel used, he didn't need the justice system to ruin Gawker.
Purveyors of news take note. Provide news. Don't engage in useless insight into peoples' personal peccadilloes which have little if any bearing on people at large. Don't be lured by the clickbait revenue model or trade in inconsequential lurid tales and try to pedal it as hard news.
Gawker may have been terrible, but we should all be a bit concerned at the precedent this sets.
It's sort of like defending the free speech of terrible groups like the KKK. We do it because we treasure free speech, not because we support the KKK.
I generally have positive feelings about Thiel, but his actions here make me very uneasy. I worry that the aristocracy will now use this method to try and close down unfavorable media outlets. I believe this will have a chilling effect on the media in the US.
What if this organisation could publish any dirt on you, could publish your most intimate pictures or details and if you were suing them, they would be fined only $10k, which they wouldn't care about because they make a lot more money abusing people?
I would say this would be justice and ordinary citizens being helpless against big business.
I think the damage was not worth putting tens (hundreds?) of people out of a job, most of them who had nothing to do with the Hogan fiasco but are still being punished for it, putting their livelihood in jeopardy for the emotional comfort of a billionaire. The people responsible for the piece should have been personally held responsible.
Regarding people losing their jobs - that is a result of the terrible judgement and values of the leadership of Gawker. They are not being 'punished' for anything. Do you think that the people at Ford were 'punished' when the leadership of Ford made bad decisions that cost people their jobs?
"emotional comfort of a billionaire"
That is very dismissive. Are people worth less to you when they have more money?
How can you justify that position? There are consequences to our choices, but they don't always follow a moral principle. If I have two job offers and choose the company that ends up going bankrupt, I'm not being punished. If I'm a farmer and plant according to weather predictions which prove false, losing crops and revenue, that might be bad luck or bad judgement, but its not punishment.
I am about as worried about gawker employees losing their jobs than I am about ISIS fighters losing their jobs. These guys are making money outing people and publishing sex tapes.
Those people knew what kind of garbage the site published and decided to hitch their wagon to it. If I join a company that is in the news for doing things that sound like it might get the shit sued out of them and they eventually get sued, should I be surprised?
That's the breaks when your corporation makes criminal mistakes and it is proven in a court of law, unless you are a bank or financial firm or politician.
Why have a problem with that? If Gawker was not in the wrong that would've been money wasted. It's not like Hogan/Thiel wore Gawker out by whittling them down with frivolous lawsuits until they couldn't defend themselves anymore.
That's precisely what Thiel's doing though -- He just hit the jackpot with the Hogan amount. He's also funding several other suits against Gawker including one from someone who claimed to have invented email. He's like a terrible patent troll for journalism.
Ah ok, that is not something I've seen mentioned anywhere else.
Still, Gawker is/was big enough that several frivolous lawsuits would've been unlikely to cause bankruptcy if none of them resulted in an adverse judgment. I have to think Thiel's goal was more to fire multiple shots and hope one finds its mark.
What jackpot? They could have gotten the insurance payout. Except they dropped that part of the suit specifically so Gawker could not use the insurance it had purchased for this reason.
Thiel's plan was exactly to wear down Gawker by frivolous lawsuits until either they collapsed or he lucked out; that's why his legal team was searching through thousands of articles looking for people they could contact to drum up a case or fund an existing case, including the 'father of email' case. Court cases are not deterministic noise-free processes.
Citing the ACLU, if Hulk Hogan’s sex tape was somehow newsworthy, then distributing it on the internet would come under the protections of the First Amendment, and Gawker would have a right to publish it. But the jury found that this case was not about the Hulk as a public figure and that the video had no news value. The Hulk, therefore, enjoys the same rights to privacy as everyone else.
Yes, a Florida jury decided that Hulk Hogan wasn't a public figure but that the damage to his career from a sex tape was worth $55 million. Do those things seem slightly contradictory to you?
Florida jury decided that Hulk Hogan wasn't a public figure
No, it's more nuanced than that. What the ACLU is saying is that there's a difference between Hulk Hogan (the public figure) and Terry Bollea (the person), and that the jury found the video wasn't about the public figure.
As for me, I can appreciate that this feels flimsy - how can one know where the line is drawn? - yet I think the distinction exists in practice and it'd be a failure of justice to deny it.
I'll just note, the ACLU isn't saying that there's a difference -- they're saying the Jury found that there's a difference. I highly doubt the ACLU agrees, especially considering that the Florida Court of Appeals already found the video newsworthy;
Hulk Hogan’s verdict will likely be overturned by the Florida District Court of Appeal, Second Circuit. That court, in earlier overturning the trial judge’s grant of a preliminary injunction to stop the publication of the video before trial, already indicated its sympathies to the First Amendment defense. The appellate court held that (1) Hogan is a public figure, as a wrestler and reality television star; (2) Hogan has already discussed his family and sex life in the media; (3) sexually explicit content does not nullify speech’s newsworthiness, (4) the posted video and commentary are linked to a matter of public concern; and, importantly, (5) Gawker carefully published only a small excerpt of the sex tape, not the entire thing. Although a ruling on a preliminary injunction does not bind the Florida court of appeals now that it can view all of the evidence, the appellate court seems poised to disregard the trial court’s First Amendment decisions, all issued without full written orders.
The ACLU is a charitable organization, and its cases have an ideological consistency. Thiel was just trying to find anything he could on Gawker (or just bury them in frivolous lawsuits if he couldn't). The cases didn't have any ideological consistency except "kill Gawker".
No, but one of the reasons "maintenance" is or was illegal is because the defendant has a right to know their accuser/opponent and their motivations, hence discovery and other pre-trial proceedings, so they can best defend themselves.
The other side to that argument is, people who are wronged by Gawker need at least a billionaire to be able to get their day in court.
It should concern you that it took money from an outside source to get an alledged wrong by a massive company to litigated in front of a jury. That should be very concerning.
As for Thiel and Gawker, they're both bullies, and bullies beating the shit out of each other is just fine by me.
Not advocating anything here really. Just pointing out that the "first amendment only applies to government actions" argument isn't valid in this case.
I think the precedent OP is concerned about is not about Hogan specifically. Thiel probably doesn't give a shit about Hogan's sex tape. He probably dislikes Gawker for other reasons (maybe general tone or content, or maybe something specific in a particular article by one of Gawker's subproperties; who knows?), but he took advantage of the opportunity the Hogan case provided to eliminate a media outlet.
The problem is that any media outlet, if they've been around long enough, has probably published something you could convince a jury was slanderous or libelous or defamatory or whatever. So the precedent I think OP is concerned about is: if you're a rich person and you don't like something a media outlet writes about you or your startup or your pet issue of the week or whatever, it's now been proven effective for you to troll through that publisher's history in search of something juicy to pay someone to sue over, and use it to take that entire company out of the water, forever, even if the thing you're suing over has nothing to do with the thing you found objectionable in the first place, which may be perfectly journalistically legitimate and legal.
Or, concretely: who's going to want to write anything nasty about Peter Thiel or his interests now, since he's proven a willingness to go to great lengths to find dirt to kill companies?
I've heard Thiel holds a grudge against Gawker for having outed him without his consent; the latter certainly happened [1], the former I wouldn't know how to confirm.
thiel couldn't nail them when they wrote about him. it was in bad taste, but totally defensible. they crossed the line when they posted a private sex tape without consent. if you can defend that, you can defend revenge porn (that is, you can't).
gawker played themselves.
> who's going to want to write anything nasty about Peter Thiel
you can write nasty things about Thiel but remember rule #1: don't play yourself.
I agree. I never read Gawker or any of its sites, they were all garbage. And the Hulk Hogan sex tape was scummy garbage that I never had any interest in. But it also isn't that different from lots of other celebrity leaks that have been published before which have not resulted in damages that ruined the publishers.
Peter Thiel funding a lawsuit against a company he has a personal grudge against is a scary thing. What if the Koch Brothers decide to start funding lawsuits against Nature or Science magazines that publisher articles about global warming? Even if none of the lawsuits win, they could shut down these publications because of the legal bills involved in the court cases.
People celebrating this are in my opinion incredibly myopic.
> What if the Koch Brothers decide to start funding lawsuits against Nature or Science magazines that publisher articles about global warming? Even if none of the lawsuits win, they could shut down these publications because of the legal bills involved in the court cases.
That would be scary but nothing was stopping them from doing that before.
In the case of Gawker they lost in court because they were wrong, they didn't run out of money due to attrition.
Let the Koch brothers sue whoever they want. They can in this country. If they want to waste their money on frivolousness and get thrown out with contempt + paying the other side's legal fees than so be it.
> I agree. I never read Gawker or any of its sites, they were all garbage.
Well, no, some of the sites under the Gawker umbrella were quite excellent. That's one more thing to lay at the feet of Nick Denton; his irresponsible behavior is going to take down some pretty good journalism along with the cesspool that was Gawker proper.
I think they may have meant 'precedent' in some colloquially sense of the word, not the legal definition. Maybe "Successful action which encourages others to attempt the same" or something like that.
We have limits on speech when it comes to private information. Should "free speech" allow gawker to publish a private citizen's sex tape? There is no "in the public interest" argument to apply here.
Ues there is - hogan is a public figure who is involved in politics and has repeatedly announced his conservative/be faithful/young-people-have-loose-morals bullshit.
Hence cheating on his wife was news, the public should have been informed, and unlike that fappening this wasnt stolen.
Cheating on his wife may have been news (I disagree, but just for the sake of argument let's say that's true). The gratuitous porn video was in every way NOT news.
A news organization should not have the right to publish a sex tape to establish dubious morality. It also should not have the right to publish Hogan taking a straining shit if he appeared previously in a hemorrhoid commercial.
"Precedent this sets"? I think "Don't publish a illegally made video of people in a private moment or ignore court orders to take down the video." to be a rather positive precedent, don't you? That's the sort of chilling effect on media we should all be applauding.
Thief merely funded a court battle that had merit (in this case, quite a lot of merit) that Bollea probably could have won on his own. I fail to see what the hand-wringing about is about.
> Don't publish a illegally made video of people in a private moment or ignore court orders to take down the video.
What about that video of Mitt Romney at a private campaign event, where he said some horrible stuff about poor people? That was a private video, probably made illegally.
Journalism is about making private things public when it suits the public. An individual (who is directly impacted by the revelations) should not be able to use the courts to crush that journalism.
Gawker has been repugnant and they shouldn't have done what they did to Hogan, but there could still be a bad precedent here.
The thoughts of a politician running for office ARE in the public interest because that person is campaigning to be elected to be a decision maker in the country.
Video of people having sex may be something the public is interested in, but it is not in the public interest. It's none of the public's business and the public should find more interesting things to be interested in.
Hogan has considered running for office multiple times, including saying he wants to be Trump's running mate[1]. Why should we distinguish between a powerful, famous businessman and actor and a politician? Anyone powerful and famous should be a public figure on the same footing.
> What about that video of Mitt Romney at a private campaign event, where he said some horrible stuff about poor people? That was a private video, probably made illegally.
And Romney had the right to sue.He didn't what you're point ?
> What about that video of Mitt Romney at a private campaign event, where he said some horrible stuff about poor people?
For the record, he didn't say anything horrible about poor people. What he said was:
> There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement. The government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49... he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. So he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. … My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5–10% in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.
He simply stated the facts: there's nothing he can do to win over a certain fraction of the electorate without compromising his principles; thus there's no point focusing on it; thus he needs to spend his time as a candidate focusing on those who he can win over without compromising his principles.
He did say bad stuff about poor people though. He incorrectly assumed that 47% of the US population will never take personal responsibility.
When you're taped stating that you are not even going to try to help 47% of the population because of a stereotype I think that people have a valid point to be upset about.
15 years ago, I met a videographer who told me a story about a job he was involved in in filming some internal meeting of the Libertarian Party in America. I realize it's hearsay, and I have no way to verify my statement, but I also have no reason to disbelieve him, given what I know of of human nature and his character in general (as much as I knew him).
Basically, his story was the upper leadership were caught on tape making comments about how the rank and file of Libertarians were essentially manipulated fools to prevent them from disrupting the power of the Republican Party. That is the gist of his story, as best I can remember. I have some sympathy for libertarian principles, and conservative ones, and liberal ones, so I am not an ideologue. This incident is entirely possible, given what I understand of human nature and how society/politics actually operates.
I agree with Gawker being repugnant etc; the story seems essentially salacious and its fundamental purpose was to drive website traffic. Are sex scandals that important, in the big picture? Only when they involve national security or other such public interest issues - e.g. General David Petraeus and his carelessness. Where is the line where exposing hypocrisy is in the public interest versus the essential rights of a person?
If they hadn't published the Hogan video, the lawyers funded by Thiel would have found someone else who's been wronged by Gawker and the outcome would be similar. The moral really is don't anger the rich and powerful.
I don't see that. There seems to be a conspiracy theory floating around that Thiel was destined to destroy Gawker even if Gawker did nothing illegal, because "money and lawsuits".
I don't buy it. Courts routinely throw out frivolous suits, sometimes they even punish the people who start them.
Agreed. I don't understand the media's response. Gawker clearly violated the law. The headline they posted the Hulk Hogan video under admitted they were violating the law (or at least going against the council of their attorneys).
The only way this case is dangerous is if people start issuing bonds which are just a collection of partial settlements of still undecided lawsuits, funded by the purchase of said bond. This doesn't exist (as no banks are backing/issuing these bonds).
Its just media FUD due to them being held accountable for violating personal privacy laws.
If you are concerned the case cost to much here's a new issue for you to care about TORT REFORM.
Yes, and Gawker had purchased insurance to deal with the ramifications of their actions.
Bollea's lawyers, as funded by Thiel, then decided to specifically drop the claim that would allow the damages payout to have been made from insurance. That's fairly vindictive.
Especially given Thiel's motive that "they outed me" - come on, Thiel's sexuality was probably the worst kept secret in the Valley. When you pose shirtless on a gay cruise, I think it's fairly safe the rest of the world didn't need Valleywag to tell them of your homosexuality.
I think a lot of what Gawker has done is repugnant.
But this is analogous to me making a bad mistake (even breaking the law) and causing a lot of damage in a car accident. In the civil trials that follow, I'm sued for damages, distress, medical bills, and the like. All well and good, as I should be.
And I have insurance. As I should have.
Except you don't like me, because I previously attacked you verbally.
So you say "Actually, your Honor, we're dropping all claims that are proximate to the accident itself, and only suing for everything that happened after the fact." which ever-so-conveniently takes my insurance off the hook for its ability to pay.
And you only do this -after- being assured you'll win, so no-one can question your real motivation (apparently, there was all this damage and distress you suffered, and you want recompense. Except now you don't, because you're removing the only realistic mechanism for you to obtain any recompense).
I don't think "secret motivations" and secret financiers should be a part of an open court system (and indeed, secretly financing lawsuits used to be and in most places is still illegal because it raises more ethical and moral questions than it answers).
Just out of interest - insurance may not have saved them. I have liability insurance etc but it's capped at £2 million. I doubt any corporate insurance plan for Gawker would be uncapped, so they may well have still gone under.
Also a good point, true. But it does put the lie to their claim, under oath, in court, that there was emotional damage suffered and that compensation was sought.
Actually, it could be construed as evidence of real emotional damage. That is, they'd rather see Gawker go under than get more money, because one would make them feel a lot better than the other.
> Especially given Thiel's motive that "they outed me" - come on, Thiel's sexuality was probably the worst kept secret in the Valley. When you pose shirtless on a gay cruise, I think it's fairly safe the rest of the world didn't need Valleywag to tell them of your homosexuality.
Does all that evidence matter? Shouldn't it be up to Theil when and where he outs himself instead of blog like Valleywag doing it for him?
If you post a profile picture like that when you are a person of public interest, I think there's a fairly good argument that you -have- outed yourself, at least implicitly.
So you'd like it if Gawker was trolling your feed (and those of your friends and family) for what they feel to be sufficient disclosure to post some gossip clickbait?
If I was a public figure (as most billionaires are classified, by the courts), and posted a picture of me on a public profile page, then I would be entirely disingenuous to say "you have no right to know this!".
Just like in Gawker's case, decisions have consequences. Don't claim your sex life is private and no-one's business (and I have zero interest) whilst posting pictures of yourself on gay cruises.
"Like" it doesn't come into it. I don't have a right to stop people doing what I don't "like".
Who gets to determine if you're a public figure? Nick Denton? You might not approve of his standards or discretion. I hope you haven't posted any 'racy' pictures, or that you don't become dangerously successful.
I am all for free speech, but if we are going to have libel and defamation laws (which I have mixed feelings about), everyone should be allowed to avail themselves of the opportunity to obtain compensation from those who have 'wronged' them.
Your right to privacy is essentially a right to determine what private moments get shared and which do not. It is not a decision you make once (at the time you become a public figure, or when you first post a private picture publicly.) It is a decision you are allowed to make with every private moment.
So this:
"Just like in Gawker's case, decisions have consequences. Don't claim your sex life is private and no-one's business (and I have zero interest) whilst posting pictures of yourself on gay cruises."
...is not saying that decisions have consequences. It is saying that people who make decisions you don't agree with have no right to privacy. You are arguing that a perceived moment of hypocrisy should somehow revoke a person's ability to make decisions.
People keep saying things like that. But I keep wondering if they have considered the flip side of that, which is are we really comfortable saying that the personal relationships of rich and famous people shouldn't be in the media?
When I go to the supermarket I see 500 headlines about famous people dating and breaking up and cheating on their partners, etc.
Sure it's a little lowbrow but do we really feel that rumors about Brad Pitt and Carrie Underwood's dating life are ok to publish but his aren't? Are Peter Thiel's relationships specifically somehow exempt from this aspect of the culture?
I don't feel that celebrity dating life is ok to publish, actually. It's very seedy and not in the public interest in the average case. Celebrites are fairly open about their disgust for the constant filming of their private life. I would relish it if Brad Pitt or someone else got a similar judgement from the courts.
> I don't feel that celebrity dating life is ok to publish, actually. It's very seedy and not in the public interest in the average case.
Freedom of the press and freedom of speech is not about evaluating everything said and determining if something is "in the public interest" in the United States. I think that focus on the "public interest" aligns more with European or Chinese cultural values.
If we are talking about personal values, I am glad we don't have censors in the US. Even if you and I can agree celebrity gossip probably has no value, what get defined as "not in the public interest" is too easy to be politically determined.
But if you haven't, you really ought to read Benedict Evans piece on this:
> Again, though, Thiel has already won. He is fabulously wealthy and extremely influential, and say what you will about Gawker, the liberal democracy that made it possible for the companies Thiel has built and invested in to emerge depends on a free press; driving a publication to bankruptcy via lawyer fees may be legal by the letter of the law, and even deserved on a personal level, but it is in absolute violation of the spirit of the law and, I might add, a rather hypocritical — or is it ironic? — use of government by the avowed libertarian Thiel. What are more concerning, though — and implicit in this concern is a critique of libertarianism — are the second and third-order effects of Thiel’s approach.
> The most obvious second-order effect is that, as Felix Salmon writes, Thiel is providing a blueprint for the suppression of the press by the wealthy. But what concerns me — and what ought to concern Thiel, and all of the Silicon Valley elites celebrating his actions — are the third order effects. Specifically, Thiel’s actions are bringing into stark relief the fundamental weakness of old analog businesses like journalism relative to the incredible power and strength of the technology sector, and if companies follow Thiel’s example, the freedom that makes the emergence of said companies possible could quickly come under threat — and deservedly so.
I see and understand where the author is coming from.
I just don't fully agree. I see a powerful person doing what nobody else was willing to do - hold a powerful and abusive media organization to account for their actions. It's far from ideal. However, no ideal answer was on offer. In an ideal world, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
To me, it is a stepwise improvement over the previous state of affairs. This reminds powerful people and organizations of something important - they are not the only ones with power.
I don't understand how this is even possible. It seems to me that the plaintiff should have no say in how you pay for damages save perhaps being able to ask for a public apology.
Spinning things as much as you're legally allowed to make as much noise and money as possible is the basis of the whole industry Gawker and Hogan are part of.
There is zero morality in showbiz, it's all dares, counter-dares, lawyers and technicalities.
You fight fire with fire. I don't think it's unfair Gawker lost at their own game. Another one will fill the void anyway.
It wasnt illegally made, it wasnt stolen, it was in the public interest (hogan is a very public figure, and has gone on at length about being faithful, not cheating, loose morals of young people).
So... Reporting on that seems like actual information that should be public? Compare to the pamela anderson tape, which was with her husband, was literally /stolen from their home/, and was sold for profit. Judge ruled that there wasnt anythig they could do.
Meanwhile, Thiel who was using hogan as a proxy has literally just demonstrated that you cant afford to post opinion pieces about tech billionaires and their occassionally delusional comments about how people should behave.
Me knowing who someone screws is absolutely not in the public interest. A video of someone screwing that they don't want public and more specifically, didn't consent to film is also not in the public interest. Privacy is a right.
Do you have a source on that? I understood that the film was stolen in addition to being taken without the knowledge or consent of Hogan.
FWIW, unless there's some real public interest beyond the prurient, I don't see why people should be able to publish anyone's private sex tapes without their consent. I would tend to say that the right to privacy should win in such cases.
I'm posting this on a throwaway account for obvious reasons, so this comment is showing up as dead. Would someone mind vouching it? Thanks!
It wasnt illegally made, it wasnt stolen, it was in the public interest (hogan is a very public figure, and has gone on at length about being faithful, not cheating, loose morals of young people).
This fetish is called wifesharing. It's not cheating, and it's not immoral. You may not personally like the idea, but calling someone's fetish immoral when all parties consent to the act is strange. Saying that it's in the public interest to know is offensive.
There are many sources that say this was a consensual act. I won't post these sordid articles here, but they are very easy to find.
This is equivalent to someone being gay, and someone else saying that it's in the public interest for their immoral acts to be made public.
I've unkilled your comment and marked the account legit, but please don't ask for people to vouch for a dead comment. That's no better than asking for votes, which isn't allowed. Also, please don't post the same comment twice.
by extension, the Fappenning was public interest, too. But somehow Gawker is saying "In the summer of 2014, anonymous hackers flooded the internet with private nude photos of major (and minor) celebrities. Two years later, new details show the FBI thinks they identified Jennifer Lawrence’s hacker. But no one’s facing charges."
I don't sympathize, but it does reek of "jackpot justice". That's a horrible thing to do, but is it so horrible as to warrant an effective "death penalty" for any company that does it once?
And what about all the other people that were the victims of such an invasion of privacy, but didn't get a reward big enough to retire on thirty times over?
The core problem is that the "justice" system is so capricious that only a few victims get made whole, and when they do, it's bizarrely over the top.
The legal system fundamentally works like that. It's the "shoot one to encourage the others" approach. Not everyone gets made whole but the sort of behavior exhibited by Gawker will likely be a lot rarer in the future.
The literal death penalty also discourages "les autres", but most people also recognize it as woefully excessive for most crimes (if not all), and would recognize the system as fundamentally broken if that system also failed to punish 99% of murderers at all, as the civil justice system fails to punish 99+% of invasions of privacy.
Everything you're saying is entirely true however the normal mechanisms that would have protected Gawker were skirted here. They structured lawsuits perfectly so that insurance never kicked in.
Should the company be penalized? Most definitely. Was it worth shutting an otherwise okay running business? Questionably.
A lot of questionable things are becoming illegal to publish lately.
For example, it's illegal to film what's happening inside a slaughterhouse[1]. Some people are getting into trouble for filming cops[2].
I'm not saying Gawker shouldn't be punished, but legality doesn't imply morality and free press in theory could be helping to review and change the immoral laws. The chilling effect from Gawker bankruptcy will be that, among other things, every publisher will know not to mess with the status quo.
One can easily imagine a next generation of laws that will make it illegal to publish leaked documents, like those that Snowden or Wikileaks released.
> I'm not saying Gawker shouldn't be punished, but legality doesn't imply morality and free press in theory could be helping to review and change the immoral laws. The chilling effect from Gawker bankruptcy will be that, among other things, every publisher will know not to mess with the status quo.
Isn't the alternative that every journalistic publication is above the law? If it were/is a free speech issue, then presumably it will be overturned on appeal?
> A lot of questionable things are becoming illegal to publish lately.
Come on. What goes on in a slaughterhouse affects all meat-eaters. It's a matter of public interest. But what happens in Hulk Hogan's bedroom between 2 consenting adults? And something that we all expect to keep private (except the exhibitionist types)? Not in the public interest at all. Would you call upskirt photos in the public interest? Or spycams in public bathrooms?
They weren't destroyed because they did it. It happened because after the fact they refused to admit their fault and make up for it, and instead continued insisting they were in the right.
The problem is that a sufficiently wealthy adversary can fund a case with little to no merit and the worst case outcome is having to pay the attorney's fees of the defendant. In the best case you can just bleed your opponent dry. This happened to Mother Jones.
The Mother Jones case is completely different. Florida has anti-SLAPP laws, Idaho doesn't.
Maybe Florida anti-SLAPP laws aren't good enough, I don't know. But it's a tough balance. Bollea's case was determine by a judge to have enough merit to take to court.
Bollea will probably lose on appeal. But he definitely has the right to his day in court.
Bollea couldn't win this on his own. He's a millionaire, but that's not enough when you're up against a 100 million dollar new media company. He would be forced to settle for a pittance. Thiel in contrast could afford to refuse all settlement offers and to take it all the way to a jury judgement. It's a messed up justice system, but in this case it worked out alright.
This is what confused me so much about the outrage Gawker was trying to incite - didn't they explicitly ignore a court order so they could keep making money on a pornographic video published without the consent of those in it?
It was my impression that Nick Denton told the court to fuck itself by ignoring the court order, and then doubled down in his deposition.
I only wish people were as ardently Constitutionalist when it came to other amendments (e.g., the one after free speech).
I for one am overjoyed with this news and have no concern whatsoever that it will be the death knell of legitimate journalism. Voyeuristic muck like Gawker makes society ugly.
I'm a free speech absolutist, but what precedent does this set that's new? The person that leaked the "Fappening" items is also being prosecuted, why should a media publication like Gawker not be held accountable? No one really seemed to have -big- issue with this until Thiel was in the picture.
> No one really seemed to have -big- issue with this until Thiel was in the picture
That's because, with Thiel's involvement, the case became about something else: a personal vendetta. Regardless of the outcome, many of us are dismayed that Thiel was able to weaponize the justice system using huge amounts of money.
> why should a media publication like Gawker not be held accountable?
The tape of Hogan had racist comments on it, which are arguably in the public interest (since Hogan is a business(man) and consumers should be able to know about his character). It was stupid and possibly illegal of them to include the sex part of the tape, but was it worth $100M? Did that part of the tape harm Hogan at all?
There is a name for weaponization of the legal system, it is called 'lawfare', and it has been going on a long time. This was a legitimate case, not some strange and arcane proceeding based on a hitherto unknown statute; it may be the case that Thiel was 'woken up' by the post about him, and has since been keeping a lookout to stop Denton's greed from harming more people. Denton isn't running a charity.
If Denton had published the tape 'for the public', he wouldn't have included the sex bit; we all know that this was classic Gawker clickbait. Denton obviously only cares about 'disclosure' when it gives him ammunition to use against his opponents, especially when he can profit off of it.
> If Denton had published the tape 'for the public', he wouldn't have included the sex bit; we all know that this was classic Gawker clickbait. Denton obviously only cares about 'disclosure' when it gives him ammunition to use against his opponents, especially when he can profit off of it.
100% agree with this. Publication of the entire tape was not necessary. What would be the difference between publishing that a tape existed or a few screenshots vs the entire tape? Clicks.
> The tape of Hogan had racist comments on it, which are arguably in the public interest
Absolute nonsense. So if, let's say, Jennifer Lawrence had a tattoo on her butt that said something derogatory, suddenly leaking her nude photos is ok? I mean, she is a public figure and kids look up to her! What she does in the privacy of her home is absolutely public information, because of this. If they -really- only were doing it for the public's benefit they would have just had that snippet, with the audio; but they didn't, they published the full tape.
> That's because, with Thiel's involvement, the case became about something else: a personal vendetta.
Do you think Hogan suing or anyone else suing for this type of thing is -not- a vendetta? Hogan was already wealthy, he didn't need Gawker's cash. He did it to take them down. Are we to not allow him to sue because that's technically a "vendetta?"
I mean, Gawker did a similar thing to Thiel by outing him to the public. That case would never hold up; so instead of going down that path he waited in the wings; I don't see how this is different than something like a class action where outside money is funding a suit.
People need to get the idea out of their head that "outside money" is inherently bad. The ACLU, FIRE, and tons of civil liberty organizations are "outside money." Be careful what you wish for.
After Thiel was revealed as the financier, some in the media saw an opportunity to re-caste the narrative in a way that they knew would appeal to our hatred of the rich and our fear for their abuse of power. The story became all about Thiel the alleged bully, the abuser of power, his petty grudge, etc etc. It was effective manipulation, just look at the comments here from those who think this 'sets a bad precedent'.
Never mind that Thiel's side was right and Gawker was wrong. Never mind that the mechanism employed to achieve justice here is basically the same mechanism that the ACLU uses.
There's no way to know, but my guess is that had Thiel stepped up in public a few years ago and said, "Gawker is a terrible gossip rag that needs to be taught a lesson -- contact me if they've wronged you too, and I'll help you mount a case", people would be less angry at him.
People don't like the idea that a shadowy cabal can run things behind the scenes without any public scrutiny.
Secondly, the ACLU does not generally appear vindictive. The ACLU looks to fund cases with a motive that people generally understand to be making things better for American society. Thiel may claim that removing Gawker from the face of the earth is a public service, but given the obvious history, that seems laughable. He appears vindictive, not altruistic.
It went to Court and went through the due process, that process hasn't prior to this case and it wont after this case and the constitution remains the same.
If you publish, you deal with the repercussions, whether positive or negative.
The only thing I dislike is that it takes a billionaire to help a millionaire financially to give the case a fair chance while the less wealthy are powerless and without aid to even start a similar battle.
Gawker can say or publish whatever they want and the Feds won't come throw them behind bars, but free speech doesn't make someone immune to ALL repercussions. You are free to go tell your boss whatever you want, but it might impact you financially. You are also free to spread rumors about whoever you want but you might get dragged into civil court and fined if you unjustly harm that person.
>It's sort of like defending the free speech of terrible groups like the KKK.
There is a difference between protecting a group from being silenced by the Government and holding a private company liable when they release a sex tape under the pretense of freedom of speech/freedom of the press.
>I believe this will have a chilling effect on the media in the US.
As well it should...its not exactly a slippery slope: sex tapes don't become newsworthy just because the subject is a celebrity.
> sex tapes don't become newsworthy just because the subject is a celebrity
What if the sex might have been non-consensual (see: Dominique Strauss-Kahn)? What if the sex is between a public official and his employee (see: Bill Clinton)? What if the sex is illegal (see: Eliot Spitzer)?
The fact is that sex can be of interest to the public, which means video of that sex can also be of interest to the public.
There is another type of illegal sex, the kind involving minors. And I don't care how news worthy anyone would deem it to be, even the most hardcore Free Speech absolutist usually goes quite confronted with that conundrum. The public's interest doesn't create protected speech.
> What if the sex might have been non-consensual (see: Dominique Strauss-Kahn)? What if the sex is between a public official and his employee (see: Bill Clinton)? What if the sex is illegal (see: Eliot Spitzer)?
Whataboutism. Hogan had the right to sue, he won, end of story. This isn't the government and a prosecution silencing Gawker, this is an individual against a corporation and he won.period.
"Whataboutism" is the bedrock of a legal system like ours. It's how you consider the consequences of a law in different edge cases that aren't as clear-cut as the current case.
You're making a common mistake here about free speech. Free speech in the First Amendment is a restriction on the government, not individuals. The reason we treasure it so much is because of the history of government's in Europe and elsewhere restricting the speech of individuals. Having experienced the perils of government censorship themselves, the Framers put this into the Constitution. Free speech has never meant "You have a right to say anything you want without consequences".
I'd be more concerned about the precedent it set if Gawker had won.
The publishing of secrets derived from an invasion of privacy is defensible by "free speech" if something of great moral/ethical imperative is gained. Publishing papers that reveal years of lying and misleading the American public about the true extent of the US government's involvement in Vietnam and surrounding countries, aka the Pentagon Papers? Defensible. Publishing a videotape without consent of someone having sex? Gawker can scream "free speech" till they're blue in the face; I think your average person is going to recognize a blatant violation of privacy occurred with little gained.
Look, I get it: free speech = awesome. But I don't think your average person sees free speech as an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card.
It's worthwhile to remember free speech is not absolute. There are several cases where it's not considered free speech, here are some examples:
Obscenity
Fighting words
Defamation (includes libel, slander)
Child pornography
Perjury
Blackmail
Incitement to imminent lawless action
True threats
Solicitations to commit crimes
I know people love to protect freedom of speech and I'm on that bandwagon, but please let's remember just because it appears freedom of speech is being violated doesn't mean it is (e.g. in cases were most people don't support something and it appears the mob rule is triumph, it should indeed be sign that something may be wrong but let's not use that sign as enough evidence that free speech is violated.) Sometimes it's not the freedom of speech that is being violated, but some person's rights.
> Gawker may have been terrible, but we should all be a bit concerned at the precedent this sets.
That you have to have serious cash to hold a news site accountable? We are not talking about a charity, Gawker is a multi-million dollar business.
I am glad Thiel did this and I hope it has a chilling effect on the media in the US. They weren't printing news, they were going for titillation that just happened embarrass someone they didn't like. Corruption in political figures, fine, but not this crud.
How about the opposite precedent? The idea that if your adversaries don't have money, you can seemingly publish whatever you like (legality and morality be damned) knowing they can't afford to sue you/defeat your large legal team?
The only thing stopping Gawker being crushed before was the fact it had a multi million dollar corporation behind it, and was happy to flat out ignore any complaints they didn't like. Now someone with more money comes along, they get smashed to a pulp and everything somehow changes.
Well put. I think a silent majority of journalists are thinking this while their less introspective colleagues reduce the situation to David vs Goliath.
Making tort claims marketable solves multiple problems:
1. The tort victim who can’t afford a lawyer. He may be able to get a law firm to take the case for a share of the award, but …
2. How does he know which law firm will do a good job, which do a bad job, which sell him out for some covert payment? If he can sell his claim, all he needs to know is which firm offers him the highest price.
I know some liberals think libertarians are gaga for markets but it seems like this would serve their egalitarian goals as well. Personally I had never considered the potential for the first point but now it seems obvious.
There will be no ceiling effect because real journalists stay within the bounds of the law. Equating a self proclaimed gossip website with real reporting is disingenuous and insulting to journalists.
If the National Enquirer broke the law and was sued, do you really think it would affect decision making at the NYT or Washington Post?
If you care about free speech as it relates to porn, then this is nothing compared to some of the other limits put on free speech. Consider the Australian guy who was convicted for having sexualized drawings of the Simpsons.
The story they reported was 100% correct, but they were still sued by the billionaire political donor that was the subject of the story. The case was eventually thrown out of court, yet it still cost Mother Jones $2.5m to defend themselves. That was enough to drive them to the brink of bankruptcy.
On the one hand it's "A rich billionaire with pockets deeper than a media organization, funding a lawsuit"
On the other hand it's "A media organization that posts what they want because it's too costly to sue them"
Perhaps the precedent is "Don't try to make a quick buck posting sex tapes without permission just because you don't think someone can afford to come after you"?
It's not as black and white as most free speech and freedom of the press issues.
Nobody was trying to stop Gawker from breaking important news, or any other kind of news. That's a false narrative driven by journalists who want to be able to do anything without oversight.
The issue wasn't that Gawker published that Hogan wasn't having an affair.
Again: the story wasn't the issue. The story didn't go to trial. The jury was not deciding whether Gawker had a right to publish the story.
The issue was Gawker publishing a sex tape to go with the story.
I personally know several gay men who were outed against their will. In some cases it ruined their lives. One committed suicide. They didn't have billions to insulate them from the harm it caused them.
None of them went on revenge campaigns for being outed, not even with their meager, non-billionaire resources.
Cant read because of paywall, but I have been following along with this "dramady." I wonder what form of invasive media will fill the void in Gawkers wake. If anyone thinks this is the end of Gawkers distasteful form of journalism they are very wrong.
Gawker worked. It was nasty, but it worked. Companies will form and fill the gap; but they'll be more resilient because they'll remember how Gawker fell.
Well Gawker isn't exactly the Wall Street Journal and they didn't get the bankruptcy treatment for having a differing political opinion or some different viewpoint. They were bullying people and now they are getting bullied.
Who said it has anything to due with equivalency? Go try to bully your boss, or a cop, or a 6'9" meat head. You're free to try, but you might not like the result. Part of life if using your brain to determine what you are free to do vs what makes sense to do.
"when unethical, unnecessary, and/or pointless to do so, and may result in you taking a literal or figurative beating". ie "common sense" meets "pick your battles"
While I do appreciate Gawker telling me about PT's sexual orientation and showing me the hulksters junk, I will reserve journalistic martyrdom status for Assange and Snowden. That's the ethical, necessary,pick your battles part of my previous post.
It wasn't direct, it was through a legal system. Are you therefore arguing that Gawker should be allowed to publish private video they obtain that was filmed without consent from the subject?
If Gawker hadn't acted in a manner opening themselves up for lawsuit, the billionaire wouldn't have been able to do anything. News organizations have some serious legal protections already.
Good thing it was just Gawker then, instead of a principled news site. Yes I understand there's collateral damage under the corporate umbrella. It happens.
Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy. By building an entire business model around such practices, Gawker is not only spreading disinformation, it is also crowding out more reputable news sources that could have better helped inform the public.
The only criticism I can give in this entire tale, is that it shouldn't take a billionaire to sue and win judgement against slanderous publishers. Such recourse should be made available to every common man, regardless of wealth.
But still, progress is only ever made, one step at a time. Good riddance to Gawker.
> Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy
One man's libel/slander is another man's investigate journalism ("muckraking" in the US). In this particular case, Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false.
> it shouldn't take a billionaire to sue and win judgement against slanderous publishers
Your comment exposed me to the big gap between the meanings of muckraker in US and UK English:
1. (US) One who investigates and exposes issues of corruption that often violate widely held values; e.g. one who exposes political corruption or the poor conditions in prisons.
2. (Britain) A sensationalist, scandal-mongering journalist, one who is not driven by any social principles.
At least in my schooling, Upton Sinclair was held up as the very model of a muckraker, and he was certainly anything but (2) above. Perhaps sensationalist on occasion, but strongly principled.
Roosevelt was applying the term to journalists at publications like McClure's. There's a great book about this period by Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit) that I can't recommend highly enough.
ProPublica, one of my favorite investigative news sources, describes some of their articles as "muckreads". They use the word proudly, with the implication that they've gone to lengths that the general public would/could not to find out important information.
As someone said, it was a pejorative term that was reclaimed, and that makes a lot of sense to me now.
What if a conservative politician lobbies for adultery being illegal, and then a sex tape emerges of him cheating on his wife? That's important journalism.
What if the CEO of a company intimidates an employee into having sex with him and secretly films it, and that gets released? That's also important journalism.
There are lots of other ways sex tapes could be newsworthy: a famous person makes racist comments in it (the Hogan tape!), a Hollywood director asks for sex in exchange for a role, etc. etc.
There is a difference between reporting on the existence of a sex tape and publishing said tape. None of the examples you gave require the tape to be published.
None of their examples are even valid. In Hogan's case, this was a consensual act. The fetish is called wifesharing, and the wife testified that it was consensual among all parties.
The number of people who are calling this cheating, immoral, etc is sort of terrifying. This is equivalent to a gay couple being caught a century ago, and everyone arguing that it's in the public's interest to know. It's not. It's consensual and harms no one.
The sole argument that could be leveled against this is that the husband secretly recorded the act. This isn't good, but "Husband secretly records consensual act" is none of our business.
By the way, if someone would vouch my comment (the same way you'd flag a comment, but click "vouch" instead of "flag"), I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
Ah, my question is ambiguous between "showing the Mohammed cartoons would be in bad taste" and "showing the Mohammed cartoons can't be allowed because it would be in bad taste".
So let me make some points myself:
1. Publishing the cartoons themselves makes a variety of statements that can't be made by reporting on their existence without showing them.
2. Those statements have great value, independent of any questions of taste.
3. Everything slg says about the difference between publishing a report that a sex tape exists vs publishing the tape itself applies in full to the Mohammed cartoons.
The right to tasteless speech is important and worth defending, but I'm not trying to do that here. I want to counter the argument slg is making, which is that tasteless reporting should be prohibited when you could approximate the same report in better taste. The raw facts always have an inherent value beyond a reporter's interpretation of them.
You are viewing this wrong because it isn't about tastelessness. It is about infringing on the rights of others. Publishing the Mohammed comic isn't infringing on anyone's rights (at least in the US with our strong freedom of speech and lack of federal blasphemy laws.) However you have a right to not be unknowingly filmed while having sex and have that video published. In the comic example you might be offending someone's sensibilities but that isn't enough to violate their rights like the sex tape example.
Or let's use a different example like the Stanford rape case. No one is reporting the name of the victim of that case, but her name is a "raw fact" of the case. Would you support releasing her name and if not, how is that different that releasing the sex tape?
What are those valuable statements? I don't see any value in publishing the Mohammed cartoons themselves (except perhaps as retaliation against those who went beyond the law to try to suppress them).
> a famous person makes racist comments in it (the Hogan tape!)
This seems to be Denton's major defense of the newsworthiness of the tape (although even he argues it half-heartedly).
I don't buy it. The racist comments on one part of the tape don't make the actual sex part newsworthy. They posted a heavily edited version of the tape, which meant they included the sex intentionally. Seems obvious the purpose of those segments was simple voyeurism, which is an invasion of privacy.
The "but he's a racist" defense strikes me as a cynical attempt to latch onto the current mainstream social-justice train, when really this has nothing to do with racism.
As I understand it, Gawker considered the racist remarks so uninteresting they didn't even include them in their original edit or coverage of the sex tape. They only became public as a result of Hulk Hogan suing.
Does that really change the underlying belief? Whether what Gawker did was libel, an invasion of privacy, or any other crime it boils down to Gawker violating the rights of other individuals and building a business model around that practice. This wasn't some brave investigative journalist exposing corruption, this was a hack posting the sex tape of a celebrity. They aren't even in the same ballpark.
> This wasn't some brave investigative journalist exposing corruption, this was a hack posting the sex tape of a celebrity.
I agree, but the reason Gawker lost is important. It was because they violated someone's privacy.
I strongly support violating the privacy of powerful, public figures in the future if it serves public interest. I agree that Gawker was stupid, greedy, and overreaching here, but I still worry that next time, the sex tape (or whatever it is) will be equally private but much more important to the public.
People are acting like their is no thought put into these type of court cases. This isn't a universal precedent that applies to every situation. It doesn't prevent any journalist from pursuing legitimate news stories and invading privacy along the way. It only prevents journalist from invading someone's privacy where the only story is the invasion itself.
A billionaire could fund cases against a media company entirely irrespective of the merit of those cases - the media company would still be forced to pay the legal fees associated with defending themselves, even if it's as simple as just getting it thrown out of court. Do it enough times and you've bankrupted the company.
For an example, Mother Jones was brought to the brink of bankruptcy for reporting an entirely true and legitimate story:
Well run media companies have insurance for this type of thing. When Mother Jones lists the cost of that lawsuit, they combined both the costs they paid with the costs the insurance company paid for a total of $2.5 million. You need to separate those two costs out if you want to prove the Mother Jones was legitimately on the brink of bankruptcy due to the lawsuit. Otherwise it just appears to be an insurance company doing the job they are paid to do.
Even still, it's $650k out of Mother Jones's pocket. Unless you're Buzzfeed or a TV network, that's more than any media organisation can easily swallow.
Plus Gawker's case was specifically structured to avoid an insurance payout. A blueprint for others in the future.
> Well run media companies have insurance for this type of thing
It looks like you haven't been paying close attention to the Gawker suite: Gawker also had insurance, but Bollea strategically dropped a charge that would have let Gawker claim against insurance (and at the same time reducing the total amount he would receive). This suite isn't about damages: it's about bankrupting Gawker for better or for worse. There's nothing that suggests a similar strategy can't be employed against Mother Jones.
I have been following the Gawker case and if the prosecutors can adjust the case in such a way to avoid insurance it tells me that either Gawker didn't have the right kind of insurance or that the insurance company found Gawker liable in such a way that they lost the right to coverage. Either way, that is a Gawker problem and not a problem of legal precedent.
> the media company would still be forced to pay the legal fees associated with defending themselves
That's obviously a big problem. I have never understood why America insists on a dogmatic principle that inherently and unavoidably gives a vast advantage to well-off parties over poor parties. You can get away with a lot of vexatious litigation before the courts (a) notice it and (b) actually act upon it.
There is no problem with the next thing. You can report about the sex tape, what is happening (because what was happening is also reprehensible) without releasing the tape itself. You know, they reported on Snowden's leaks and Panama Papers without releasing them. It's not impossible by any means.
| Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false.
...not to mention, Hogan's public persona and living he has earned has been by posing as a larger than life clownish character; I don't even see that he was harmed. Ask yourself, do you think less of Hogan now? (and not because it turns out that he has less impressive sounding real name)
Hogan can't eat our positive thoughts. He lost a lot of respect among the kind of people that (economically) matter a lot to him, like sponsors and employers.
I get the idea of what you said, but did he, really measurably? plus: the information released about him was accurate; who says you get to have secrets that disqualify you from jobs that you hide from your employer? I'm not saying we want to have a big brother society, but I am saying if you present yourself as wholesome (whatever that means) and you are not wholesome, then you are false advertising anyway, to people who care about that.
Anyway maybe it made him relevant again ("there is no such thing as bad PR"), I had forgotten he existed. Need to wait for some time to go by before it's clear.
I'm not advocating a side or devil's advocating, i just prefer the "less outraged middle" over the "outraged extremes"
Jennifer Lawrence's persona and living are based on being extremely attractive, so was it Ok to hack her iCloud and publish her nude selfies? Strangely, Gawker crowd was very upset that no one went to jail for it.
I'm not saying Gawker is OK or not, nor that they are hypcocrites or not.
I'm talking about the standards that courts use to measure "harm". Young starlets have so many sex tapes (their own and hacked) out there, and it doesn't seem to harm them much.
It's almost as if a porn star could make a better claim that they lost the commercial potential of something stolen!
Again, I'm not saying that I want to live in a world where it's ok to steal people's sex tapes and put them out there; but I am also noting that in today's world, it is much less of a "harm" or even an embarrassment to people than it was when the system of torts was established. Since torts are based on harm, we run into the issue of "how much harm did this cause?"
maybe it needs to be made illegal like "upskirts". (and I'm not advocating that, either. I'm saying, I'd like some clarity to exactly what people are outraged by)
One possible solution is the constitutional right to an attorney in civil cases as well as in criminal, but I don't know how you'd protect that against abuse.
Why do you need an attorney at all? Perhaps that is the question we should be asking. Rather than figuring out how to give one to everyone for free, and then protecting it against abuse.
Yes, I believe our system should be amended to ensure that roughly equal resources are available to both parties. The court should require an accounting of all legal fees to be filed. In certain cases, the wealthier party to the litigation should be obliged to pay an amount of money equal to their own expenditures on legal fees into a trust run by the court, which would ensure the less-wealthy party gets equally-solid representation and would prevent a lot of the bullying-by-lawsuit that goes on. Far fewer ridiculous bluffs will come out of international firms like Skadden or MTO when their client knows that they're also going to need to forward that $1,000/hr to the party they're threatening.
Would Donald Trump have sued the journalist who published a piece estimating his true net worth if this was in place?
How about a differet system? Both parties pay into a pot based on how much money they have. Then the only legal advice can they take is set by random rather than by anyone's choice, out of roughly equal quality legal teams paid for by the money from the pot?
Just make it so money cannot buy better lawyers or legal advice, and the court system would be made far fairer to everyone.
The problem is that specific issues need specific expertise. The client should have the right to pick his/her attorney if he has the resources. This keeps attorneys interested in keeping a competitive skillset and a good track record. It's too important to leave to chance. You really need an attorney who understands the subject matter if you want a good outcome. We just need to equalize the buying power so that one side is not deprived of the ability to obtain equal representation.
> In certain cases, the wealthier party to the litigation should be obliged to pay an amount of money equal to their own expenditures on legal fees into a trust run by the court, which would ensure the less-wealthy party gets equally-solid representation and would prevent a lot of the bullying-by-lawsuit that goes on.
Sounds like that could be gamed by lawyers to turn into a full-employment-for-lawyers act.
Failure of a hedge fund during the worldwide financial crash, out of which he started two new investment entities (Thiel Capital and Mithril) which are alive and well.
I can't understand why people are so upset about a third party paying legal expenses... what do you think the ACLU, EFF, and tons of other organizations and private citizens (either in individual or collective form) do? A jury (impartial to Thiel and unaware of his involvement) found Gawker and Nick Denton personally guilty. Denton himself is worth over $100 million (Gawker itself was valued according to reports to the court at $80 million, so he has plenty of assets outside Gawker), so this isn't a story of a big financier ganging up on a "little guy" that people are trying to make it out to be.
Failure of a hedge fund during the worldwide financial crash, out of which he started two new investment entities (Thiel Capital and Mithril) which are alive and well.
I can't understand why people are so upset about a third party paying legal expenses... what do you think the ACLU, EFF, and tons of other organizations and private citizens (either in individual or collective form) do? A jury (impartial to Thiel and unaware of his involvement) found Gawker and Nick Denton personally guilty. Denton himself is worth over $100 million (Gawker itself was valued according to reports to the court at $80 million, so he has plenty of assets outside Gawker), so this isn't a story of a big financier ganging up on a "little guy" that people are trying to make it out to be.
Please don't post drive-by insinuations to HN. If you know something, back it up. But please don't lower the quality of discourse here by making things up.
I vaguely remember (please, someone, correct me if I am wrong) an article by Parker explaining the whole affair - my impression was the truth(tm) was someone in the middle. Or it was just very good damage control by Parker...
Of course, whether those sites should be saved is another question. Some have some good content, but some are exactly the kind of low quality, often legally shaky muckraking that got Gawker sued into oblivion in the first place.
If you like the kind of journalism you currently get from Engadget, Kotaku, Valleywag, et al., you'll still be able to get it even if they're shut down. It's not as though the terms of the decision include the slaughter en masse of the editorial staff and reporters, after all; they'll find jobs elsewhere and continue to get published. Life goes on.
False. Statements must be untrue to be either libel (written) or slander (verbal). The sex tape in question was real.
I would not be so quick to celebrate. This case has demonstrated that one or two very powerful, wealthy individuals (Peter Thiel et al) are able to destroy a successful business and ruin the livlihoods of dozens merely because they were embarassed.
(It's worth noting that what Gawker originally wrote about Thiel was also apparently true.)
You are definitely correct that Gawker's behavior wasn't technically illegal, but it was still a shitty thing to do, so I have zero sympathy for them.
> I would not be so quick to celebrate. This case has demonstrated that one or two very powerful, wealthy individuals (Peter Thiel et al) are able to destroy a successful business and ruin the livlihoods of dozens merely because they were embarassed.
That's always been true anyway. On the bright side, this time it was all over the internet, so that's some kind of progress at least.
> (It's worth noting that what Gawker originally wrote about Thiel was also apparently true.)
In both cases the info Gawker published was really nobody's business but that of the people involved. They published it as shameful attempts to get page views and (possibly) just to be mean. So good riddance.
You don't have to have sympathy for them to want this not to have happened. I don't like Gawker. If you want to argue the world is a better place without them, I'm not going to take the other side.
But the way they've been destroyed is terrifying for anyone who wants to live in a free and informed society. The ends don't justify the means.
He was videotaped without his knowledge in a situation he had every reason to expect was private. If you then obtain that tape and publish it you're scum. The livelihoods of the employees were ruined by their idiot bosses who thought it would be a good idea to publish the video, not by the persons defending their privacy.
Actually the judge wouldn't let Gawker present evidence from the FBI that both Hogan and the woman knew they were being taped. This means that not only is it possible that they lied on the stand, but with the huge amount required to appeal ($50 million), it's possible that they may get away with perjury.
I used to listen to Bubba the Love Sponge--the guy who's house the tape was made in--back during that timeframe (before I knew what kind of a horrible person he apparently is).
On an almost daily basis Bubba talked on air about he had cameras all over his house and taped everything. I find it very hard to believe that me--a random radio listener--knew that he taped everything in his house, but supposedly his best friend Hulk Hogan was oblivious.
"Actually" this theory doesn't make any sense once you consider the fact that the racist statements that ended his career were on this tape. He went through his long public career without making racist statements despite harboring racist beliefs, so he knew what impact such statements would have. If he had known he was being taped for publicity, it would have made no sense for him to make what he would know to be public racist statements.
The judge didn't allow the evidence be heard likely because there was no evidence (conjecture). It's the standard desperation you get from someone losing a case or appealing a loss.
The fact that in private Hulk Hogan is a racist piece of garbage, as is VERY clear if you see a transcript of the tape, seems to me like something which is news, and something that should be reported. During his wrestling career he was marketed as the good guy, a hero, and true American. Publishing the sex tape was going too far, but publishing what was on the tape, that's legitimate journalism.
> and ruin the livlihoods of dozens merely because they were embarassed.
Gawker ruined the livelihoods of its employees, not Hulk Hogan, not Thiel, with its scummy behavior.Hogan is the victim here, as much as Gawker's employees, they are victim of Gawker's policy which is profit at all cost. Well now Gawker is paying that cost.
They're not bankrupt due to libel and slander. They're bankrupt for sharing stories that many people believe should be better left in private. The specific stories that got them here, regarding Hulk Hogan and before that Peter Thiel, are not libel or slander, as they both involve true information. The issue is whether publishing these things is an invasion of privacy that damages the individuals involved.
Much as you might hate Gawker, and I definitely think their practices of outing people for no reason and publishing sex tapes are morally and ethically shitty, what this really shows is that if you piss a billionaire off, they can and likely will silence you. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
> Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy.
You seem to not understand what freedom of speech means. As someone who actually lives in a place where people use libel and slander laws to sue people left and right and get offended, consequence being censorships and a tightening of restrictions on speech, I'd kill to have the kind of freedom Gawker did.
Lovely to see Hacker News praising the wisdom of the billionaire who just managed to shut down a press outlet he didn't like. This new era of feudalism is off to a great start.
Sad in a way. AFAIK, Gawker is not only one of the few independent online media companies (VICE/Vox/BuzzFeed/BusinessInsider are heavily funded/owned by massive media conglomerates), it was one of the few media companies period making a healthy profit:
> The company’s revenue had grown from about $5.3 million in 2006 to $43.8 million in 2014. It was consistently profitable, with a 2014 operating income of $6.7 million. Most importantly, it had an ambitious plan to create a lucrative new revenue stream by monetizing third-party content on its proprietary online publishing platform, Kinja, that promised to deliver the site from many of the increasing pressures facing ad-supported digital publishing.
I wouldn't be surprised if Gawker were the only online-only media company that was making profits in the range of millions. That Hogan video, which couldn't have brought in more than a good week's worth of traffic, was a fucking dumb way to flush a nearly billion dollar company down the toilet. For legal reasons, Gawker has publicly stood by the former editor who published the post (and then who went on to create another Gawker-like site [1], that immediately folded because of non-traffic), but I wonder if Gawker employees are privately treating him like a pariah.
I find it kind of perverse to champion a company based solely on their profitability. Gawker was a profitable media company because they were one of the the only ones debased enough to resort to muckraking for their tasteless, voyeuristic audiences.
As much great journalism Gawker has produced, we can't ignore that such work was mostly loss-leaders, and not likely what drove its revenue and popularity. The decision to post the Hogan video was just a symptom of that culture, albeit a fatal symptom.
I also think that outing a wealthy, powerful man like Thiel is beneficial to society. It hopefully increases acceptance of homosexuality.
Of all people who are hurt by being outed in a major publication, Thiel is probably near the end of the list, since he was already out among his associates and extremely wealthy.
Fortunately, the rule of law as it applies to harm done to an individual isn't generally ignored because of some extremely vague and dubious benefit to the greater good.
Tim Geithner's brother wasn't. Gawker is going down and that's a good thing. What people do in private is not Gawker's business.
> major publication
A bunch of scums and dishonest people who call themselves journalists. If I was a journalist, I would hate being put in the same bag as Gawker's employees.
A racist billionaire[1], funding another racist millionaire[2], supporting another racist billionaire[3]
But everyone seems to be ok with this, because of pseudo libertarianism?
Libertarianism: "All the parts of government that benefit rich folks are legit/necessary/essential. All the parts that benefit poor folks are illegitimate/aggression/tyranny."
He's expressed support on the "right" of businesses to discriminate based on race/gender/etc[1]. As well as libertarianism being critical of the civil rights act, the civil war, etc [2].
Penn Jillette has a great saying on this (paraphrasing):
"Unless the person has explicitly said they're racist, claiming someone is racist requires the power to look into someone's heart, which no one has. The KKK and stormfront are very open that they are racists, and you can call those people racist because they say they are. You cannot make these sorts of claims without putting words into other people's mouth".
And you're putting words in someone's mouth. According to that article, Thiel believes that affirmative action is not helping the poor or disenfranchised, but is rather helping the middle and upper class people. Extrapolating racism from his statements is a giant leap in logic.
I've argued both sides of this. I don't believe in the absolutist case in either direction.
If someone's making a plausible and reasonably consistent, and especially not self-serving case that they hold, or don't hold, some belief, I'll generally allow them to own it. I'll especially allow them to own it in preference to another party with a specific, partisan, self-serving, and most especially, non-credible axe to grind in denying that self-labeling.
That said, if the self-claim is grossly inconsistent, self-serving, and implausible, I'll deny it.
I'm not judging the current case either way. I'm not a fan of Gawkers, but am also hugely concerned with the precedent Thiel's made here.
If you're attacking the people involved for their social and political views, you may as well ask what the views are of the people involved in Gawker as well.
And there are way more examples out there. Like Sam Biddle and his bullying comments, or various disturbing anti male comments by Jezebel, or various comments about wishing horrible things on their opponents.
It isn't an "attack". Look, I'm not trying to change minds, I'm hoping people step back for a second, and see this for what it is. Just another thin skinned person with way too much financial power getting his way.
Pointing out the attack on Gawker is wrong, does not mean I condone Gawkers' behavior. That's pretty much the definition of seeing the world in the shades of gray/color it actually is.
Wait, wait - are you seriously suggesting that people should be treated differently by the legal system based on the political views that they hold?
This is one of the fundamental tenants of western democracy that you're up against here, not "pseudo libertarianism". Rule of Law. We want our legal system to punish people and organizations that publish sex tapes made without the involved parties' consent. Sometimes that means that a "racist billionaire" funds a lawsuit by "another racist millionaire".
I'm torn between everyone having their privacy and ripping the band-aid off by exposing everyone's private life at once so we see how things really are instead of how we think them to be
For instance, I'd bet that many marriages are largely keeping up appearances while hiding some big secrets which would put the whole concept of "Western marriage" at risk (perhaps justifiably)
Do you need to see how everyone's private life is, or is this just curiosity?
Sure, if you can live with the unnecessary consequences of how some people might react when their private lives are exposed - Ashley Madison Hack[0] provides a salient recent example [1].
Furthermore, it is obvious to many that some marriages are all for appearances. But they are also for children. They're also to appease nuclear and extended family. I don't understand the line of thinking where you could justify needing to know which other families are staying together "for the children" or "to keep their parents happy."
Is it any of your business?
Humans have kept their thoughts to themselves throughout their entire history (citation needed). Because the data collection practices of the Internet deceive the average person into giving their private thoughts to a SERP or telemetry-ridden OS, that gives you the right to "rip the bandaid" off everyone?
Though I am personally very pro-privacy, I do think about the parent poster's thoughts sometimes. I have a thought that goes like this:
Masturbation. For a long time, this was taboo, both for families and in public discourse (sitcom innuendos, not really taught in lots of sex ed classes, NASA not commenting on space masturbation). We didn't really talk about it, so you'd end up with kids doing this and feeling ashamed. On one hand I see the pro-privacy argument that my business is private, and if gawker posted a blog post on my masturbation habits, it would be deeply intrusive. However in the absence of privacy, we'd see that this is not a big deal, and everyone does it. The latter scenario is the world I'd want to live in, the former is the world I do live in.
So privacy allows us to live lives as we would like, while maintaining the appearance that we're living our lives as society allows. This is very good, but at the same time, you could just relax society's restrictions with the same result.
Regarding the links... Perhaps, if those intolerant countries realized the TOTAL truth, they might accept it and move on instead of killing people? (note that American intolerance for infidelity is the same as Saudi Arabia and faaaar lower than France.)
There are of course things I freely elect to not know. Simple example, the sexual details of all the exes of my current girlfriend. I could ask her and she'd tell
me, but I won't. Call it insecurity...
565 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadThat wording seems a bit too kind to Gawker.
Therefore, a deep pockets agent funding every potential lawsuit from other parties they can find (or stimulate), increasing the number of such suits and the likelihood that they will go to trial, can, simply by taking enough swings, eventually impose a combination of legal costs and judgements that will financially destroy the target; actual unlawful behavior may reduce the time it takes for this strategy to succeed, but isn't necessary for it to work.
So, given Theil's demonstrated proclivities in the multiple lawsuits he was funding against Gawker, I don't think the statement that Gawker would have been okay if they had stayed within the law is warranted.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315985
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11318100
- Gawker outs Pether Thiel
- Gawker publishes a person's sex tape without their consent.
- Peter Thiel is a hard-core activist for individual rights, including freedom of speech
Thiel is pro-freedom when it suits him and anti-freedom when it doesn't. In my opinion, he has lobbied for a world where journalists can "out" people, and now he's taking revenge when it happens to harm him.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/10/gawker-media-files-for-ch-11-...
Really simplified example: suppose you're 12, you own a lemonade stand, and you owe your dad $200 (secured against the lemonade stand). It's not going well, so you go through bankruptcy - dad now owns the lemonade stand, you no longer owe dad any money, and he goes and sells it for whatever he can get (say, $100). $100 is a sensible bid for the stand because the debt to the kid's dad has already been discharged.
1) Gawker was garbage dwelling story makers. I am glad they aren't going to do stories anymore.
2) Who will it be the next time something happens like this will it be a actual journalist and good content producer that gets sued to death? Scared for journalist????
Also would be nice to see LifeHacker survive this.
Hopefully the market niche of LifeHacker will be polyfilled quickly. Also hopefully, the market niche of most of the rest of Gawker won't.
Hopefully it finds a new home without too much blood loss.
I also like The Consumerist, but it was sold off to Consumer Reports and was doing okay until it was hacked. Now it's only a shell of its former self. What really made that site was the user contributions, but that died off after they closed the comments after the attack.
Enjoy the wins when they're around. You can never predict the future too well anyway.
Gawker appealed the injunction, and Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal issued an immediate stay, which prevented the injunction from going into effect. Eight months later, the appeals court issued a scathing opinion that overturned Campbell’s order on the grounds that the video was newsworthy and Gawker's publication of it was protected by the First Amendment.
Armed with the appeals court decision, Gawker went back to Campbell and asked her to dismiss the case, since the appeals court had just ruled that publishing the video was protected by the First Amendment. Campbell refused.
http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/03/jury-awards-hulk...
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/billionaire-sued...
Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy Friday and the company will be put up for auction after a judge ruled that a $140 million jury judgment against it in a costly legal battle with former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan would stand.
The sale auction will begin with an opening bid of $100 million from the digital media company and publisher Ziff Davis LLC, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The sale was triggered after the judge overseeing the invasion-of-privacy case brought by Hulk Hogan—whose real name is Terry Bollea—declined to issue a stay pending Gawker’s appeal.
Proceeds from a sale will go into a fund to finance further litigation costs and cover whatever damages may ultimately be leveled following the appeals process, which could take years to resolve.
Two weeks ago, it emerged that Silicon Valley billionaire and investor Peter Thiel has been financing Mr. Bollea’s legal fight and other such battles involving people who Mr. Thiel feels have been targeted unfairly by the media company.
Also, sites like Gawker benefit from encouraging the most base aspects of our culture. Seeing one head of the hydra getting chopped off isn't really progress, but it is satisfying.
Privately funding a lawsuit for someone else so you can settle a grudge is ethically dubious, at best.
The American system of allowing juries instead of judges to set reward amounts only ultimately benefits overpaid lawyers, and society as a whole is worse off from the damages of frivolous lawsuits.
That's all I think there really is to say about that...
Do you feel that revenge in general is ethically dubious or just the lawsuit part?
Judges can be corrupted. The jury is basically a direct poll of 12 average Americans. Its known that the court system is imperfect, but juries serve as a restraint on otherwise powerful judges.
Well, except for the part where the lawyers get to remove the people they don't want. It's not really random at that point.
In the end though, I feel that this really has very little to do with the justice system. It was only a vehicle Thiel used, he didn't need the justice system to ruin Gawker.
It's sort of like defending the free speech of terrible groups like the KKK. We do it because we treasure free speech, not because we support the KKK.
I generally have positive feelings about Thiel, but his actions here make me very uneasy. I worry that the aristocracy will now use this method to try and close down unfavorable media outlets. I believe this will have a chilling effect on the media in the US.
What if this organisation could publish any dirt on you, could publish your most intimate pictures or details and if you were suing them, they would be fined only $10k, which they wouldn't care about because they make a lot more money abusing people?
I would say this would be justice and ordinary citizens being helpless against big business.
http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/sentencing-la...
"emotional comfort of a billionaire"
That is very dismissive. Are people worth less to you when they have more money?
Yes
They knew who they were working for. Lie down with dogs, etc.
[1] http://www.whysanity.net/monos/clerks5.html
Thiel had an issue with Gawker, Thiel should have taken it to Gawker.
The Gizmodo article that Thiel thinks is worth suing Gawker over: http://gizmodo.com/5887480/the-inventor-of-email-did-not-inv...
Still, Gawker is/was big enough that several frivolous lawsuits would've been unlikely to cause bankruptcy if none of them resulted in an adverse judgment. I have to think Thiel's goal was more to fire multiple shots and hope one finds its mark.
No, it's more nuanced than that. What the ACLU is saying is that there's a difference between Hulk Hogan (the public figure) and Terry Bollea (the person), and that the jury found the video wasn't about the public figure.
As for me, I can appreciate that this feels flimsy - how can one know where the line is drawn? - yet I think the distinction exists in practice and it'd be a failure of justice to deny it.
Hulk Hogan’s verdict will likely be overturned by the Florida District Court of Appeal, Second Circuit. That court, in earlier overturning the trial judge’s grant of a preliminary injunction to stop the publication of the video before trial, already indicated its sympathies to the First Amendment defense. The appellate court held that (1) Hogan is a public figure, as a wrestler and reality television star; (2) Hogan has already discussed his family and sex life in the media; (3) sexually explicit content does not nullify speech’s newsworthiness, (4) the posted video and commentary are linked to a matter of public concern; and, importantly, (5) Gawker carefully published only a small excerpt of the sex tape, not the entire thing. Although a ruling on a preliminary injunction does not bind the Florida court of appeals now that it can view all of the evidence, the appellate court seems poised to disregard the trial court’s First Amendment decisions, all issued without full written orders.
http://overlawyered.com/2016/05/champerty-maintenance-explai...
This is incredibly common, e.g. it's basically the entire job description of the ACLU. Why is it different in this case?
The ACLU is a charitable organization, and its cases have an ideological consistency. Thiel was just trying to find anything he could on Gawker (or just bury them in frivolous lawsuits if he couldn't). The cases didn't have any ideological consistency except "kill Gawker".
It should concern you that it took money from an outside source to get an alledged wrong by a massive company to litigated in front of a jury. That should be very concerning.
As for Thiel and Gawker, they're both bullies, and bullies beating the shit out of each other is just fine by me.
There is no way Hogan wasn't a public figure. viz him talking to Howard Stern about his sex life.
Gawker had, under previous First Amendment jurisprudence, the right to post that tape. Most free speech lawyers assume it will be reversed on appeal.
This is completely separate from whether they should have posted that tape.
that if you say something, you stand by the consequences, financial and all?
that people take responsibility for what they say is not a new development.
new journals are free to start up and take the place of gawker. nothing here stops them from doing so.
That's not happening here.
Not advocating anything here really. Just pointing out that the "first amendment only applies to government actions" argument isn't valid in this case.
The problem is that any media outlet, if they've been around long enough, has probably published something you could convince a jury was slanderous or libelous or defamatory or whatever. So the precedent I think OP is concerned about is: if you're a rich person and you don't like something a media outlet writes about you or your startup or your pet issue of the week or whatever, it's now been proven effective for you to troll through that publisher's history in search of something juicy to pay someone to sue over, and use it to take that entire company out of the water, forever, even if the thing you're suing over has nothing to do with the thing you found objectionable in the first place, which may be perfectly journalistically legitimate and legal.
Or, concretely: who's going to want to write anything nasty about Peter Thiel or his interests now, since he's proven a willingness to go to great lengths to find dirt to kill companies?
[1] http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people
gawker played themselves.
> who's going to want to write anything nasty about Peter Thiel
you can write nasty things about Thiel but remember rule #1: don't play yourself.
But also I hated Gawker, so, difficult to feel too sorry about this particular development.
Peter Thiel funding a lawsuit against a company he has a personal grudge against is a scary thing. What if the Koch Brothers decide to start funding lawsuits against Nature or Science magazines that publisher articles about global warming? Even if none of the lawsuits win, they could shut down these publications because of the legal bills involved in the court cases.
People celebrating this are in my opinion incredibly myopic.
That would be scary but nothing was stopping them from doing that before.
In the case of Gawker they lost in court because they were wrong, they didn't run out of money due to attrition.
If those articles were somehow actually legally libellous, that would be fine. But that seems unlikely.
Well, no, some of the sites under the Gawker umbrella were quite excellent. That's one more thing to lay at the feet of Nick Denton; his irresponsible behavior is going to take down some pretty good journalism along with the cesspool that was Gawker proper.
Hence cheating on his wife was news, the public should have been informed, and unlike that fappening this wasnt stolen.
A news organization should not have the right to publish a sex tape to establish dubious morality. It also should not have the right to publish Hogan taking a straining shit if he appeared previously in a hemorrhoid commercial.
There are standards in civilized society.
Thief merely funded a court battle that had merit (in this case, quite a lot of merit) that Bollea probably could have won on his own. I fail to see what the hand-wringing about is about.
What about that video of Mitt Romney at a private campaign event, where he said some horrible stuff about poor people? That was a private video, probably made illegally.
Journalism is about making private things public when it suits the public. An individual (who is directly impacted by the revelations) should not be able to use the courts to crush that journalism.
Gawker has been repugnant and they shouldn't have done what they did to Hogan, but there could still be a bad precedent here.
Video of people having sex may be something the public is interested in, but it is not in the public interest. It's none of the public's business and the public should find more interesting things to be interested in.
1. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/29/hulk-hogan-i...
And Romney had the right to sue.He didn't what you're point ?
For the record, he didn't say anything horrible about poor people. What he said was:
> There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement. The government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49... he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. So he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. … My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5–10% in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.
He simply stated the facts: there's nothing he can do to win over a certain fraction of the electorate without compromising his principles; thus there's no point focusing on it; thus he needs to spend his time as a candidate focusing on those who he can win over without compromising his principles.
When you're taped stating that you are not even going to try to help 47% of the population because of a stereotype I think that people have a valid point to be upset about.
How do you know that he was incorrect?
Basically, his story was the upper leadership were caught on tape making comments about how the rank and file of Libertarians were essentially manipulated fools to prevent them from disrupting the power of the Republican Party. That is the gist of his story, as best I can remember. I have some sympathy for libertarian principles, and conservative ones, and liberal ones, so I am not an ideologue. This incident is entirely possible, given what I understand of human nature and how society/politics actually operates.
I agree with Gawker being repugnant etc; the story seems essentially salacious and its fundamental purpose was to drive website traffic. Are sex scandals that important, in the big picture? Only when they involve national security or other such public interest issues - e.g. General David Petraeus and his carelessness. Where is the line where exposing hypocrisy is in the public interest versus the essential rights of a person?
I don't buy it. Courts routinely throw out frivolous suits, sometimes they even punish the people who start them.
Gawker lost because Gawker was wrong.
Yes Thiel has shakey ethics. Gawker violated the law AND ethics. Neither side was good in this case.
If you think court cases are too expensive PERIOD... Then start caring about Tort Reform.
The only way this case is dangerous is if people start issuing bonds which are just a collection of partial settlements of still undecided lawsuits, funded by the purchase of said bond. This doesn't exist (as no banks are backing/issuing these bonds).
Its just media FUD due to them being held accountable for violating personal privacy laws.
If you are concerned the case cost to much here's a new issue for you to care about TORT REFORM.
Bollea's lawyers, as funded by Thiel, then decided to specifically drop the claim that would allow the damages payout to have been made from insurance. That's fairly vindictive.
Especially given Thiel's motive that "they outed me" - come on, Thiel's sexuality was probably the worst kept secret in the Valley. When you pose shirtless on a gay cruise, I think it's fairly safe the rest of the world didn't need Valleywag to tell them of your homosexuality.
I think a lot of what Gawker has done is repugnant.
But this is analogous to me making a bad mistake (even breaking the law) and causing a lot of damage in a car accident. In the civil trials that follow, I'm sued for damages, distress, medical bills, and the like. All well and good, as I should be.
And I have insurance. As I should have.
Except you don't like me, because I previously attacked you verbally.
So you say "Actually, your Honor, we're dropping all claims that are proximate to the accident itself, and only suing for everything that happened after the fact." which ever-so-conveniently takes my insurance off the hook for its ability to pay.
And you only do this -after- being assured you'll win, so no-one can question your real motivation (apparently, there was all this damage and distress you suffered, and you want recompense. Except now you don't, because you're removing the only realistic mechanism for you to obtain any recompense).
I don't think "secret motivations" and secret financiers should be a part of an open court system (and indeed, secretly financing lawsuits used to be and in most places is still illegal because it raises more ethical and moral questions than it answers).
Does all that evidence matter? Shouldn't it be up to Theil when and where he outs himself instead of blog like Valleywag doing it for him?
Just like in Gawker's case, decisions have consequences. Don't claim your sex life is private and no-one's business (and I have zero interest) whilst posting pictures of yourself on gay cruises.
"Like" it doesn't come into it. I don't have a right to stop people doing what I don't "like".
I am all for free speech, but if we are going to have libel and defamation laws (which I have mixed feelings about), everyone should be allowed to avail themselves of the opportunity to obtain compensation from those who have 'wronged' them.
So this:
"Just like in Gawker's case, decisions have consequences. Don't claim your sex life is private and no-one's business (and I have zero interest) whilst posting pictures of yourself on gay cruises."
...is not saying that decisions have consequences. It is saying that people who make decisions you don't agree with have no right to privacy. You are arguing that a perceived moment of hypocrisy should somehow revoke a person's ability to make decisions.
Agree, but it isn't illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberace_v_Daily_Mirror
http://www.theargus.co.uk/magazine/nostalgia/pastpresent/445...
When I go to the supermarket I see 500 headlines about famous people dating and breaking up and cheating on their partners, etc.
Sure it's a little lowbrow but do we really feel that rumors about Brad Pitt and Carrie Underwood's dating life are ok to publish but his aren't? Are Peter Thiel's relationships specifically somehow exempt from this aspect of the culture?
Freedom of the press and freedom of speech is not about evaluating everything said and determining if something is "in the public interest" in the United States. I think that focus on the "public interest" aligns more with European or Chinese cultural values.
If we are talking about personal values, I am glad we don't have censors in the US. Even if you and I can agree celebrity gossip probably has no value, what get defined as "not in the public interest" is too easy to be politically determined.
1) It feels obviously wrong to me to have someone publicly outed like that. [like you say, the evidence doesn't matter]
2) It feels sketchy for a wronged person to retaliate by having a nontrivial player in written media shut down.
I find a private, rich entity shutting down a media company much scarier than a media company publishing facts.
But if you haven't, you really ought to read Benedict Evans piece on this:
> Again, though, Thiel has already won. He is fabulously wealthy and extremely influential, and say what you will about Gawker, the liberal democracy that made it possible for the companies Thiel has built and invested in to emerge depends on a free press; driving a publication to bankruptcy via lawyer fees may be legal by the letter of the law, and even deserved on a personal level, but it is in absolute violation of the spirit of the law and, I might add, a rather hypocritical — or is it ironic? — use of government by the avowed libertarian Thiel. What are more concerning, though — and implicit in this concern is a critique of libertarianism — are the second and third-order effects of Thiel’s approach.
> The most obvious second-order effect is that, as Felix Salmon writes, Thiel is providing a blueprint for the suppression of the press by the wealthy. But what concerns me — and what ought to concern Thiel, and all of the Silicon Valley elites celebrating his actions — are the third order effects. Specifically, Thiel’s actions are bringing into stark relief the fundamental weakness of old analog businesses like journalism relative to the incredible power and strength of the technology sector, and if companies follow Thiel’s example, the freedom that makes the emergence of said companies possible could quickly come under threat — and deservedly so.
https://stratechery.com/2016/peter-thiel-comic-book-hero/
I just don't fully agree. I see a powerful person doing what nobody else was willing to do - hold a powerful and abusive media organization to account for their actions. It's far from ideal. However, no ideal answer was on offer. In an ideal world, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
To me, it is a stepwise improvement over the previous state of affairs. This reminds powerful people and organizations of something important - they are not the only ones with power.
This is: you hit me with a car, i find out what your insurance covers, and then make sure that your insurance wont cover it.
There is zero morality in showbiz, it's all dares, counter-dares, lawyers and technicalities.
You fight fire with fire. I don't think it's unfair Gawker lost at their own game. Another one will fill the void anyway.
So... Reporting on that seems like actual information that should be public? Compare to the pamela anderson tape, which was with her husband, was literally /stolen from their home/, and was sold for profit. Judge ruled that there wasnt anythig they could do.
Meanwhile, Thiel who was using hogan as a proxy has literally just demonstrated that you cant afford to post opinion pieces about tech billionaires and their occassionally delusional comments about how people should behave.
FWIW, unless there's some real public interest beyond the prurient, I don't see why people should be able to publish anyone's private sex tapes without their consent. I would tend to say that the right to privacy should win in such cases.
Posting the video got them in trouble (for obvious reasons), and refusing to take it down played a big role in the final sentence (aka death).
It wasnt illegally made, it wasnt stolen, it was in the public interest (hogan is a very public figure, and has gone on at length about being faithful, not cheating, loose morals of young people).
This fetish is called wifesharing. It's not cheating, and it's not immoral. You may not personally like the idea, but calling someone's fetish immoral when all parties consent to the act is strange. Saying that it's in the public interest to know is offensive.
There are many sources that say this was a consensual act. I won't post these sordid articles here, but they are very easy to find.
This is equivalent to someone being gay, and someone else saying that it's in the public interest for their immoral acts to be made public.
Also, just because it interests you and you're a member of the public does not make it a public interest
So it's OK as long as they cross the "very" threshhold?
And what about all the other people that were the victims of such an invasion of privacy, but didn't get a reward big enough to retire on thirty times over?
The core problem is that the "justice" system is so capricious that only a few victims get made whole, and when they do, it's bizarrely over the top.
Should the company be penalized? Most definitely. Was it worth shutting an otherwise okay running business? Questionably.
For example, it's illegal to film what's happening inside a slaughterhouse[1]. Some people are getting into trouble for filming cops[2].
I'm not saying Gawker shouldn't be punished, but legality doesn't imply morality and free press in theory could be helping to review and change the immoral laws. The chilling effect from Gawker bankruptcy will be that, among other things, every publisher will know not to mess with the status quo.
One can easily imagine a next generation of laws that will make it illegal to publish leaked documents, like those that Snowden or Wikileaks released.
[1] http://www.thenation.com/article/charged-crime-filming-slaug... [2] http://www.copblock.org/1281/filmingpolice/
Isn't the alternative that every journalistic publication is above the law? If it were/is a free speech issue, then presumably it will be overturned on appeal?
Come on. What goes on in a slaughterhouse affects all meat-eaters. It's a matter of public interest. But what happens in Hulk Hogan's bedroom between 2 consenting adults? And something that we all expect to keep private (except the exhibitionist types)? Not in the public interest at all. Would you call upskirt photos in the public interest? Or spycams in public bathrooms?
That strikes me as overreach. There's clearly a privacy question here, but the video is real, the words are real, and the events actually happened.
I've never seen the video. I don't care. Hogan's sex life is not interesting to me. People already masterbate to him.
I'm struggling to understand how a large amount of damage was dealt.
Maybe Florida anti-SLAPP laws aren't good enough, I don't know. But it's a tough balance. Bollea's case was determine by a judge to have enough merit to take to court.
Bollea will probably lose on appeal. But he definitely has the right to his day in court.
It was my impression that Nick Denton told the court to fuck itself by ignoring the court order, and then doubled down in his deposition.
He has funded multiple suits against Gawker.
He wasn't giving a friend some money, he was explicitly searching out cases to take down a media company. That's a precedent.
I for one am overjoyed with this news and have no concern whatsoever that it will be the death knell of legitimate journalism. Voyeuristic muck like Gawker makes society ugly.
That's because, with Thiel's involvement, the case became about something else: a personal vendetta. Regardless of the outcome, many of us are dismayed that Thiel was able to weaponize the justice system using huge amounts of money.
> why should a media publication like Gawker not be held accountable?
The tape of Hogan had racist comments on it, which are arguably in the public interest (since Hogan is a business(man) and consumers should be able to know about his character). It was stupid and possibly illegal of them to include the sex part of the tape, but was it worth $100M? Did that part of the tape harm Hogan at all?
If Denton had published the tape 'for the public', he wouldn't have included the sex bit; we all know that this was classic Gawker clickbait. Denton obviously only cares about 'disclosure' when it gives him ammunition to use against his opponents, especially when he can profit off of it.
100% agree with this. Publication of the entire tape was not necessary. What would be the difference between publishing that a tape existed or a few screenshots vs the entire tape? Clicks.
But he funded a winning suit. He wasn't pestering them with this suit. It was a 100% legitimate suit. He funded a correct result.
You want scary? Even Hulk Hogan doesn't have enough money to fund a correct lawsuit.
Absolute nonsense. So if, let's say, Jennifer Lawrence had a tattoo on her butt that said something derogatory, suddenly leaking her nude photos is ok? I mean, she is a public figure and kids look up to her! What she does in the privacy of her home is absolutely public information, because of this. If they -really- only were doing it for the public's benefit they would have just had that snippet, with the audio; but they didn't, they published the full tape.
> That's because, with Thiel's involvement, the case became about something else: a personal vendetta.
Do you think Hogan suing or anyone else suing for this type of thing is -not- a vendetta? Hogan was already wealthy, he didn't need Gawker's cash. He did it to take them down. Are we to not allow him to sue because that's technically a "vendetta?"
I mean, Gawker did a similar thing to Thiel by outing him to the public. That case would never hold up; so instead of going down that path he waited in the wings; I don't see how this is different than something like a class action where outside money is funding a suit.
People need to get the idea out of their head that "outside money" is inherently bad. The ACLU, FIRE, and tons of civil liberty organizations are "outside money." Be careful what you wish for.
After Thiel was revealed as the financier, some in the media saw an opportunity to re-caste the narrative in a way that they knew would appeal to our hatred of the rich and our fear for their abuse of power. The story became all about Thiel the alleged bully, the abuser of power, his petty grudge, etc etc. It was effective manipulation, just look at the comments here from those who think this 'sets a bad precedent'.
Never mind that Thiel's side was right and Gawker was wrong. Never mind that the mechanism employed to achieve justice here is basically the same mechanism that the ACLU uses.
There's no way to know, but my guess is that had Thiel stepped up in public a few years ago and said, "Gawker is a terrible gossip rag that needs to be taught a lesson -- contact me if they've wronged you too, and I'll help you mount a case", people would be less angry at him.
People don't like the idea that a shadowy cabal can run things behind the scenes without any public scrutiny.
Secondly, the ACLU does not generally appear vindictive. The ACLU looks to fund cases with a motive that people generally understand to be making things better for American society. Thiel may claim that removing Gawker from the face of the earth is a public service, but given the obvious history, that seems laughable. He appears vindictive, not altruistic.
It went to Court and went through the due process, that process hasn't prior to this case and it wont after this case and the constitution remains the same.
If you publish, you deal with the repercussions, whether positive or negative.
The only thing I dislike is that it takes a billionaire to help a millionaire financially to give the case a fair chance while the less wealthy are powerless and without aid to even start a similar battle.
There is a difference between protecting a group from being silenced by the Government and holding a private company liable when they release a sex tape under the pretense of freedom of speech/freedom of the press.
>I believe this will have a chilling effect on the media in the US.
As well it should...its not exactly a slippery slope: sex tapes don't become newsworthy just because the subject is a celebrity.
What if the sex might have been non-consensual (see: Dominique Strauss-Kahn)? What if the sex is between a public official and his employee (see: Bill Clinton)? What if the sex is illegal (see: Eliot Spitzer)?
The fact is that sex can be of interest to the public, which means video of that sex can also be of interest to the public.
How exactly is it "very different from adult people consensually enjoying themselves"?
(An irony that the first site that came up was Gawker)
All I see is a report that it exists. Neither of the two links in the tweet were to stories showing the photos.
There is another type of illegal sex, the kind involving minors. And I don't care how news worthy anyone would deem it to be, even the most hardcore Free Speech absolutist usually goes quite confronted with that conundrum. The public's interest doesn't create protected speech.
Whataboutism. Hogan had the right to sue, he won, end of story. This isn't the government and a prosecution silencing Gawker, this is an individual against a corporation and he won.period.
The publishing of secrets derived from an invasion of privacy is defensible by "free speech" if something of great moral/ethical imperative is gained. Publishing papers that reveal years of lying and misleading the American public about the true extent of the US government's involvement in Vietnam and surrounding countries, aka the Pentagon Papers? Defensible. Publishing a videotape without consent of someone having sex? Gawker can scream "free speech" till they're blue in the face; I think your average person is going to recognize a blatant violation of privacy occurred with little gained.
Look, I get it: free speech = awesome. But I don't think your average person sees free speech as an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card.
Obscenity Fighting words Defamation (includes libel, slander) Child pornography Perjury Blackmail Incitement to imminent lawless action True threats Solicitations to commit crimes
I know people love to protect freedom of speech and I'm on that bandwagon, but please let's remember just because it appears freedom of speech is being violated doesn't mean it is (e.g. in cases were most people don't support something and it appears the mob rule is triumph, it should indeed be sign that something may be wrong but let's not use that sign as enough evidence that free speech is violated.) Sometimes it's not the freedom of speech that is being violated, but some person's rights.
That you have to have serious cash to hold a news site accountable? We are not talking about a charity, Gawker is a multi-million dollar business.
I am glad Thiel did this and I hope it has a chilling effect on the media in the US. They weren't printing news, they were going for titillation that just happened embarrass someone they didn't like. Corruption in political figures, fine, but not this crud.
The only thing stopping Gawker being crushed before was the fact it had a multi million dollar corporation behind it, and was happy to flat out ignore any complaints they didn't like. Now someone with more money comes along, they get smashed to a pulp and everything somehow changes.
I'm with David Friedman on this.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/05/ot51-alien-vs-threadato...
Making tort claims marketable solves multiple problems:
1. The tort victim who can’t afford a lawyer. He may be able to get a law firm to take the case for a share of the award, but …
2. How does he know which law firm will do a good job, which do a bad job, which sell him out for some covert payment? If he can sell his claim, all he needs to know is which firm offers him the highest price.
I know some liberals think libertarians are gaga for markets but it seems like this would serve their egalitarian goals as well. Personally I had never considered the potential for the first point but now it seems obvious.
If the National Enquirer broke the law and was sued, do you really think it would affect decision making at the NYT or Washington Post?
Edit: grrrrr autocorrect
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/billionaire-sued...
The story they reported was 100% correct, but they were still sued by the billionaire political donor that was the subject of the story. The case was eventually thrown out of court, yet it still cost Mother Jones $2.5m to defend themselves. That was enough to drive them to the brink of bankruptcy.
On the one hand it's "A rich billionaire with pockets deeper than a media organization, funding a lawsuit"
On the other hand it's "A media organization that posts what they want because it's too costly to sue them"
Perhaps the precedent is "Don't try to make a quick buck posting sex tapes without permission just because you don't think someone can afford to come after you"?
It's not as black and white as most free speech and freedom of the press issues.
https://www.splcenter.org/seeking-justice/case-docket/keenan...
Think tanks have been subpoenaed over AGW skepticism:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/subpoenae...
Media organizations have been prevented from reporting on Hillary Clinton during a political campaign:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
This sort of thing has been common practice for a long time.
The only real difference is that this time the media sees the victim as being part of their tribe and the attacker being part of an opposing tribe.
And it's not as if gawker doesn't regularly break important news -- viz the crack mayor, Chris Lee / republicans cruising for strange, etc.
The issue wasn't that Gawker published that Hogan wasn't having an affair.
Again: the story wasn't the issue. The story didn't go to trial. The jury was not deciding whether Gawker had a right to publish the story.
The issue was Gawker publishing a sex tape to go with the story.
The sex tape was apparently legal as under first amendment law as understood by lawyers at the time gawker published it.
Again, he's a public figure.
I don't think you understand how this is an abuse of money on the juritary system.
I think you've bought into a narrative created by fearful journalists.
Trust me, Hulk Hogan and Thiel aren't friends, he just has a personal vendeta with it.
And I think you bought into a narrative of Silicon Valley cocksuckers ;-)
None of them went on revenge campaigns for being outed, not even with their meager, non-billionaire resources.
Gawker worked. It was nasty, but it worked. Companies will form and fill the gap; but they'll be more resilient because they'll remember how Gawker fell.
Thiel has now made it impossible for Gawker to continue as a company.
The effect of the bullying is vastly different.
Those with more money, skills, whatever will always be in a position of power over those with less.
Thiel could've most certainly crushed Gawker even without the court system.
The only criticism I can give in this entire tale, is that it shouldn't take a billionaire to sue and win judgement against slanderous publishers. Such recourse should be made available to every common man, regardless of wealth.
But still, progress is only ever made, one step at a time. Good riddance to Gawker.
One man's libel/slander is another man's investigate journalism ("muckraking" in the US). In this particular case, Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false.
> it shouldn't take a billionaire to sue and win judgement against slanderous publishers
It's actually much harder to win a libel/slander suit as a public figure. See: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/libel-defamation
1. (US) One who investigates and exposes issues of corruption that often violate widely held values; e.g. one who exposes political corruption or the poor conditions in prisons.
2. (Britain) A sensationalist, scandal-mongering journalist, one who is not driven by any social principles.
As someone said, it was a pejorative term that was reclaimed, and that makes a lot of sense to me now.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker
What if the CEO of a company intimidates an employee into having sex with him and secretly films it, and that gets released? That's also important journalism.
There are lots of other ways sex tapes could be newsworthy: a famous person makes racist comments in it (the Hogan tape!), a Hollywood director asks for sex in exchange for a role, etc. etc.
The number of people who are calling this cheating, immoral, etc is sort of terrifying. This is equivalent to a gay couple being caught a century ago, and everyone arguing that it's in the public's interest to know. It's not. It's consensual and harms no one.
The sole argument that could be leveled against this is that the husband secretly recorded the act. This isn't good, but "Husband secretly records consensual act" is none of our business.
By the way, if someone would vouch my comment (the same way you'd flag a comment, but click "vouch" instead of "flag"), I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
So let me make some points myself:
1. Publishing the cartoons themselves makes a variety of statements that can't be made by reporting on their existence without showing them.
2. Those statements have great value, independent of any questions of taste.
3. Everything slg says about the difference between publishing a report that a sex tape exists vs publishing the tape itself applies in full to the Mohammed cartoons.
The right to tasteless speech is important and worth defending, but I'm not trying to do that here. I want to counter the argument slg is making, which is that tasteless reporting should be prohibited when you could approximate the same report in better taste. The raw facts always have an inherent value beyond a reporter's interpretation of them.
Or let's use a different example like the Stanford rape case. No one is reporting the name of the victim of that case, but her name is a "raw fact" of the case. Would you support releasing her name and if not, how is that different that releasing the sex tape?
Against someone saying there should be legal liability for releasing it, definitely.
This seems to be Denton's major defense of the newsworthiness of the tape (although even he argues it half-heartedly).
I don't buy it. The racist comments on one part of the tape don't make the actual sex part newsworthy. They posted a heavily edited version of the tape, which meant they included the sex intentionally. Seems obvious the purpose of those segments was simple voyeurism, which is an invasion of privacy.
The "but he's a racist" defense strikes me as a cynical attempt to latch onto the current mainstream social-justice train, when really this has nothing to do with racism.
I agree, but the reason Gawker lost is important. It was because they violated someone's privacy.
I strongly support violating the privacy of powerful, public figures in the future if it serves public interest. I agree that Gawker was stupid, greedy, and overreaching here, but I still worry that next time, the sex tape (or whatever it is) will be equally private but much more important to the public.
People are acting like their is no thought put into these type of court cases. This isn't a universal precedent that applies to every situation. It doesn't prevent any journalist from pursuing legitimate news stories and invading privacy along the way. It only prevents journalist from invading someone's privacy where the only story is the invasion itself.
A billionaire could fund cases against a media company entirely irrespective of the merit of those cases - the media company would still be forced to pay the legal fees associated with defending themselves, even if it's as simple as just getting it thrown out of court. Do it enough times and you've bankrupted the company.
For an example, Mother Jones was brought to the brink of bankruptcy for reporting an entirely true and legitimate story:
http://m.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersl...
Plus Gawker's case was specifically structured to avoid an insurance payout. A blueprint for others in the future.
It looks like you haven't been paying close attention to the Gawker suite: Gawker also had insurance, but Bollea strategically dropped a charge that would have let Gawker claim against insurance (and at the same time reducing the total amount he would receive). This suite isn't about damages: it's about bankrupting Gawker for better or for worse. There's nothing that suggests a similar strategy can't be employed against Mother Jones.
That's obviously a big problem. I have never understood why America insists on a dogmatic principle that inherently and unavoidably gives a vast advantage to well-off parties over poor parties. You can get away with a lot of vexatious litigation before the courts (a) notice it and (b) actually act upon it.
...not to mention, Hogan's public persona and living he has earned has been by posing as a larger than life clownish character; I don't even see that he was harmed. Ask yourself, do you think less of Hogan now? (and not because it turns out that he has less impressive sounding real name)
I'd have more sympathy for a "normal" person.
Anyway maybe it made him relevant again ("there is no such thing as bad PR"), I had forgotten he existed. Need to wait for some time to go by before it's clear.
I'm not advocating a side or devil's advocating, i just prefer the "less outraged middle" over the "outraged extremes"
I'm talking about the standards that courts use to measure "harm". Young starlets have so many sex tapes (their own and hacked) out there, and it doesn't seem to harm them much.
It's almost as if a porn star could make a better claim that they lost the commercial potential of something stolen!
Again, I'm not saying that I want to live in a world where it's ok to steal people's sex tapes and put them out there; but I am also noting that in today's world, it is much less of a "harm" or even an embarrassment to people than it was when the system of torts was established. Since torts are based on harm, we run into the issue of "how much harm did this cause?"
maybe it needs to be made illegal like "upskirts". (and I'm not advocating that, either. I'm saying, I'd like some clarity to exactly what people are outraged by)
Would Donald Trump have sued the journalist who published a piece estimating his true net worth if this was in place?
Just make it so money cannot buy better lawyers or legal advice, and the court system would be made far fairer to everyone.
Sounds like that could be gamed by lawyers to turn into a full-employment-for-lawyers act.
Also its a good lesson to other sites to police content to ensure no one says anything bad about billionaires.
Thank god for thiel protecting us from horrible things like censorship!
I can't understand why people are so upset about a third party paying legal expenses... what do you think the ACLU, EFF, and tons of other organizations and private citizens (either in individual or collective form) do? A jury (impartial to Thiel and unaware of his involvement) found Gawker and Nick Denton personally guilty. Denton himself is worth over $100 million (Gawker itself was valued according to reports to the court at $80 million, so he has plenty of assets outside Gawker), so this isn't a story of a big financier ganging up on a "little guy" that people are trying to make it out to be.
I can't understand why people are so upset about a third party paying legal expenses... what do you think the ACLU, EFF, and tons of other organizations and private citizens (either in individual or collective form) do? A jury (impartial to Thiel and unaware of his involvement) found Gawker and Nick Denton personally guilty. Denton himself is worth over $100 million (Gawker itself was valued according to reports to the court at $80 million, so he has plenty of assets outside Gawker), so this isn't a story of a big financier ganging up on a "little guy" that people are trying to make it out to be.
There's a brave new world of pro-billionaires media awaiting us. Just compare this lavish Vanity Fair piece (http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/photos-sean-parker-we...) on Sean Parker's wedding to the ugly reality behind it all, as published by Gawker: http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-full-damage-of-facebook-bill...
As opposed to the brave world of billion-dollar news corporations destroying millionaires.
For context, you really should have published Mr. Parker's defense: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/sean-p...
http://www.recode.net/2016/6/10/11904892/memom-here-s-what-z...
Of course, whether those sites should be saved is another question. Some have some good content, but some are exactly the kind of low quality, often legally shaky muckraking that got Gawker sued into oblivion in the first place.
Or maybe to not publish sex tapes?
I would not be so quick to celebrate. This case has demonstrated that one or two very powerful, wealthy individuals (Peter Thiel et al) are able to destroy a successful business and ruin the livlihoods of dozens merely because they were embarassed.
(It's worth noting that what Gawker originally wrote about Thiel was also apparently true.)
> I would not be so quick to celebrate. This case has demonstrated that one or two very powerful, wealthy individuals (Peter Thiel et al) are able to destroy a successful business and ruin the livlihoods of dozens merely because they were embarassed.
That's always been true anyway. On the bright side, this time it was all over the internet, so that's some kind of progress at least.
> (It's worth noting that what Gawker originally wrote about Thiel was also apparently true.)
In both cases the info Gawker published was really nobody's business but that of the people involved. They published it as shameful attempts to get page views and (possibly) just to be mean. So good riddance.
But the way they've been destroyed is terrifying for anyone who wants to live in a free and informed society. The ends don't justify the means.
Why? That seems like an important piece of evidence.
On an almost daily basis Bubba talked on air about he had cameras all over his house and taped everything. I find it very hard to believe that me--a random radio listener--knew that he taped everything in his house, but supposedly his best friend Hulk Hogan was oblivious.
http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/03/jury-awards-hulk...
The judge didn't allow the evidence be heard likely because there was no evidence (conjecture). It's the standard desperation you get from someone losing a case or appealing a loss.
Gawker ruined the livelihoods of its employees, not Hulk Hogan, not Thiel, with its scummy behavior.Hogan is the victim here, as much as Gawker's employees, they are victim of Gawker's policy which is profit at all cost. Well now Gawker is paying that cost.
Much as you might hate Gawker, and I definitely think their practices of outing people for no reason and publishing sex tapes are morally and ethically shitty, what this really shows is that if you piss a billionaire off, they can and likely will silence you. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
You seem to not understand what freedom of speech means. As someone who actually lives in a place where people use libel and slander laws to sue people left and right and get offended, consequence being censorships and a tightening of restrictions on speech, I'd kill to have the kind of freedom Gawker did.
Very well played by Thiel, whether or not you agree with what he did.
http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/06/gawkers-pre-hoga...
> The company’s revenue had grown from about $5.3 million in 2006 to $43.8 million in 2014. It was consistently profitable, with a 2014 operating income of $6.7 million. Most importantly, it had an ambitious plan to create a lucrative new revenue stream by monetizing third-party content on its proprietary online publishing platform, Kinja, that promised to deliver the site from many of the increasing pressures facing ad-supported digital publishing.
I wouldn't be surprised if Gawker were the only online-only media company that was making profits in the range of millions. That Hogan video, which couldn't have brought in more than a good week's worth of traffic, was a fucking dumb way to flush a nearly billion dollar company down the toilet. For legal reasons, Gawker has publicly stood by the former editor who published the post (and then who went on to create another Gawker-like site [1], that immediately folded because of non-traffic), but I wonder if Gawker employees are privately treating him like a pariah.
[1] http://ratter.com/
Good riddance, I say.
As much great journalism Gawker has produced, we can't ignore that such work was mostly loss-leaders, and not likely what drove its revenue and popularity. The decision to post the Hogan video was just a symptom of that culture, albeit a fatal symptom.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/mail-titles-overtake-sun-becom...
But yeah, a company being profitable (especially a media one) doesn't mean it's a good thing for society.
I also think that outing a wealthy, powerful man like Thiel is beneficial to society. It hopefully increases acceptance of homosexuality.
Of all people who are hurt by being outed in a major publication, Thiel is probably near the end of the list, since he was already out among his associates and extremely wealthy.
Tim Geithner's brother wasn't. Gawker is going down and that's a good thing. What people do in private is not Gawker's business.
> major publication
A bunch of scums and dishonest people who call themselves journalists. If I was a journalist, I would hate being put in the same bag as Gawker's employees.
But everyone seems to be ok with this, because of pseudo libertarianism?
Libertarianism: "All the parts of government that benefit rich folks are legit/necessary/essential. All the parts that benefit poor folks are illegitimate/aggression/tyranny."
Oh man... what is going on!?!
[1]https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...
[2]http://nypost.com/2015/07/24/why-is-wwe-frantically-scrubbin...
[3]http://www.salon.com/2016/06/09/donald_trumps_response_to_re...
[3a]http://www.wired.com/2016/05/investor-peter-thiel-will-calif...
How is that doublethink?
[1] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education... [2] http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/16/racism-civil-rights-an...
Penn Jillette has a great saying on this (paraphrasing):
"Unless the person has explicitly said they're racist, claiming someone is racist requires the power to look into someone's heart, which no one has. The KKK and stormfront are very open that they are racists, and you can call those people racist because they say they are. You cannot make these sorts of claims without putting words into other people's mouth".
And you're putting words in someone's mouth. According to that article, Thiel believes that affirmative action is not helping the poor or disenfranchised, but is rather helping the middle and upper class people. Extrapolating racism from his statements is a giant leap in logic.
If someone's making a plausible and reasonably consistent, and especially not self-serving case that they hold, or don't hold, some belief, I'll generally allow them to own it. I'll especially allow them to own it in preference to another party with a specific, partisan, self-serving, and most especially, non-credible axe to grind in denying that self-labeling.
That said, if the self-claim is grossly inconsistent, self-serving, and implausible, I'll deny it.
I'm not judging the current case either way. I'm not a fan of Gawkers, but am also hugely concerned with the precedent Thiel's made here.
http://nypost.com/2016/03/09/gawker-editors-line-a-sex-tape-...
And there are way more examples out there. Like Sam Biddle and his bullying comments, or various disturbing anti male comments by Jezebel, or various comments about wishing horrible things on their opponents.
This is not a black and white situation.
Pointing out the attack on Gawker is wrong, does not mean I condone Gawkers' behavior. That's pretty much the definition of seeing the world in the shades of gray/color it actually is.
This is one of the fundamental tenants of western democracy that you're up against here, not "pseudo libertarianism". Rule of Law. We want our legal system to punish people and organizations that publish sex tapes made without the involved parties' consent. Sometimes that means that a "racist billionaire" funds a lawsuit by "another racist millionaire".
See also: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-co...
Calling his comments about that judge "racist" is a bit of a stretch.
For instance, I'd bet that many marriages are largely keeping up appearances while hiding some big secrets which would put the whole concept of "Western marriage" at risk (perhaps justifiably)
Do you need to see how everyone's private life is, or is this just curiosity?
Sure, if you can live with the unnecessary consequences of how some people might react when their private lives are exposed - Ashley Madison Hack[0] provides a salient recent example [1].
Furthermore, it is obvious to many that some marriages are all for appearances. But they are also for children. They're also to appease nuclear and extended family. I don't understand the line of thinking where you could justify needing to know which other families are staying together "for the children" or "to keep their parents happy."
Is it any of your business?
Humans have kept their thoughts to themselves throughout their entire history (citation needed). Because the data collection practices of the Internet deceive the average person into giving their private thoughts to a SERP or telemetry-ridden OS, that gives you the right to "rip the bandaid" off everyone?
[0]: http://fusion.net/story/195787/whats-going-on-with-ashley-ma... [1]: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-ashely-madison...
Masturbation. For a long time, this was taboo, both for families and in public discourse (sitcom innuendos, not really taught in lots of sex ed classes, NASA not commenting on space masturbation). We didn't really talk about it, so you'd end up with kids doing this and feeling ashamed. On one hand I see the pro-privacy argument that my business is private, and if gawker posted a blog post on my masturbation habits, it would be deeply intrusive. However in the absence of privacy, we'd see that this is not a big deal, and everyone does it. The latter scenario is the world I'd want to live in, the former is the world I do live in.
So privacy allows us to live lives as we would like, while maintaining the appearance that we're living our lives as society allows. This is very good, but at the same time, you could just relax society's restrictions with the same result.
There are of course things I freely elect to not know. Simple example, the sexual details of all the exes of my current girlfriend. I could ask her and she'd tell me, but I won't. Call it insecurity...