Slashdot Mirror
Courts Begin To Frown On Online Badmouthing
Whistler's Mother writes: "Employers are winning key legal victories against former workers who criticize them online. Rulings in the waning days of 2001 could have a chilling effect on workers' use of cyberspace for years to come, civil libertarians say. The battle over Internet free speech also is heating up as more firms crack down on grousing by laid-off staff. Read the whole story here."
There is a difference between grousing and slander. If you have a grouse with your employer, maybe you should discuss it with your boss. If that doesn't fix the problem and there is some regulation in violation, consider whistleblowing. If you can't get away with printing it in a publication, what makes you think you can get away with it online?
If I need to tell the truth about an employer that I don't even work for anymore, than nobody should be able to stop it. If I quit or get fired, what more do they want? If it's true, than it's not slanderous. This sets a bad precedent: why couldn't movie studios hire thugs to make sure a given film gets a high rating...?
The guy sent 35,000 emails to the employees of his ex-company and the court ruled that it was spam. Maybe this isn't such a landmark ruling against free speech after all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
from the article:
/.ers tend to hail and celebrate. in a post to a story about spam laws, i predicted something like this, and here it is. the general slashdot attitude toward internet legislation must apply at all times: keep your laws off the internet. even when the laws are about spam. otherwise, shit like this happens.
The court ruled Hamidi's e-mails basically amounted to trespassing.
"We were very pleased. Our view is that this was the equivalent of spam," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy says.
this is basically an offshoot of the spam laws -- those very same ones which
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
It's rather frightening to realize that there are people who only obey the law or social norms because they are too lazy to do otherwise until internet makes it easy.
More firms also are taking action to unmask anonymous posters. Pittsburgh-based software firm printCafe is taking legal action to learn the identity of anonymous posters ...
... "It's to stop people from spreading vicious lies."
"It's not about the First Amendment," says Terry Budd,
That's a pretty funny quote, considering that the most legally interesting First Amendment cases are ones that involve libel (vicious lies). That aside, you have to wonder who's liable for AC postings once the forum has "forgotten" the poster's identity. Say I run a weblog, and someone posts something deeply libelous to my weblog anonymously, and I don't keep access logs, or delete them within a few weeks. Am I now responsible for the comments because I've forgotten the poster's identity?
If so, then that is going to affect... Slashdot.
If not, then every weblog in the world should stop tracking poster's information to spare themselves the legal hassle.
Another quote that bothered me:
The court ruled Hamidi's e-mails basically amounted to trespassing.
"We were very pleased. Our view is that this was the equivalent of spam,"
Well, which is it? Trespassing is illegal, and spam isn't, except in California, and certainly not in this court. If email is trespassing, how do you ask permission to send email? His email didn't even meet California's standard for spam because he wasn't trying to sell anything, and it wasn't libel because no one, not even Intel, says that we was lying.
If you can trespass with E-mail, we're going to be living in very uncertain times. Or perhaps the lesson is merely: don't mess with corporations, they bend the law to their will.
So, it's still okay to badmouth how Slashdot editors reject all my stories, right?
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
Usually people don't have that kind of time to waste standing on a street corner, but they have some time to make a web page that says that
Now, if somebody is up there saying that their boss was on crack at work, and it wasn't true, that's another story..
Free Mac Mini
It's rather frightening that things protected by the first amendment can be made illegal. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
It's also kind of frightening that leaflets, newspapers, and megaphones today seem to be legally limited only to large corporations, and the medium with the most promise of letting the average citizen compete on an even footing is being unlawfully restrained in this manner.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
All this article means is that people in general are taking the Internet more seriously and those who abuse it for personal gain are more likely to get nailed for it. Sending 35,000 messages of a potentially libellous nature is not the same as putting up a personal opinion on a website. So is making outrageous claims based on hearsay or completely lacking in evidence.
Yes, there is sometimes a fine line between simply venting a personal opinion and libel. I don't see anything in this article that says Free Speech is in danger. Getting your panties in a bunch over this when there are far more real threats out there is folly.
We now return your knees to their previously un-jerked position.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
Our government today is almost totally owned by the corps. To the point that VERY unpopular, and illegal (If you believe at all in interpreting the Constitution as written) law like the DMCA can sail on to passage with no debate to a unanimous voice vote.
Corps don't like to be badmouthed. It used to be that courts by and large threw out almost ALL slander/libel suits brought by corporations, because libel and slander law by and large apply to PERSONS, not quasi-entities like a corp.
In these days of out of control litigation, those who can afford legal teams (like corps) can pretty much deny civil liberties to anyone who can't (like a laid off worker). This is because today, NO ONE has any rights unless cleared in a court...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
The writeup says,
But you know, Whistler's Mother actually just cut and pasted it from USA Today's page. No thought, no additional quote marks, no attribution to the actual writer, Stephanie Armour, just a quick dump to the submission form to get their name on the Slashdot front page.
And if you think this is off-topic, we're discussing 'online publication integrity', which would include slander, libel, plagiarism and general complaining. If people would respect each others rights, and don't take the lazy or litigious way through life, then we'd actually get somewhere.
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It appears that in most cases if you slander a company, or libel a company (or officers of a company) then you should be held accountable for your actions.
Spamming 35k messages at Intel employees is not the same as saying Intel sucks, even if the message is Intel sucks. Posting 14000 messages on a message board is not the same as say walking around with a sign in front of the company.
The size of the response, even if it was technology enabled (ie, bot generated) does cross the line from being a 'Free Speech' to harassment.
If it was five or six messages that got these people in hot water then we have an issue, but let's face it, they were being vendictive online, and it got them in trouble.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
If people are badmouthing a company and the company decides to take action, then you just have to make sure that you can prove what you're saying...
How is this either
a bad thing
different to the current laws of libel (remember, it's not slander; it's written)
What you just stated is quite different from current laws of libel. Here's a brief summary from some random site called tje Libel Defense Resource Center that seems more or less accurate:
The defamatory statement must also have been made with fault. The extent of the fault depends primarily on the status of the plaintiff. Public figures, such as government officials, celebrities, well-known individuals, and people involved in specific public controversies, are required to prove actual malice, a legal term which means the defendant knew his statement was false or recklessly disregarded the truth or falsity of his statement. In general, private individuals must show only that the defendant was negligent, that he failed to act with due care in the situation.
That's a fairly significant difference-- the plaintiff has to show that the statement is false, and at the very least that you should have known it was false.
The instances in the article are particularly egregious, and involve a lot of spamming and so on. Whether or not that was material to the case, I'm sure it didn't help their standing with the judge or jury.
Trouble is, the net isn't exactly like any of those things. It's a little like printing leaflets; it's a little like a conversation in a pub; it's a little like newspapers; it's a little like a coffee morning; it's a little like chatting to the queue at the supermarket; it's a little like carving your name on a tree; and it's a lot like something completely new.
So you can't just apply every existing law you like to it willy-nilly. Some existing laws will still be appropriate; some will best be applicable after modification; and some won't work well at all.
And then there's the problem of jurisdiction. If we here in the UK pass laws governing net use, will you in the USA abide by them? Thought not. But of course we'll need to abide by your laws, won't we...
And it gets more complicated. Who has jurisdiction if a German citizen visits Finland, dials into an Irish ISP, connects to a web site hosted in Mexico and uploads some dodgy stuff that's then downloaded by an American in Paris?...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Over the past few years I've seen countless websites fall victim to corprate lawyers for one thing or another. Sites that have done nothing more than parody a company's product have fallen victim to the threats of lawsuits.
And that's where the problem lies. The threat.
Corporations know if they sue you in some district court in California, odds are you aren't going to even be able to show up to represent yourself, much less hire legal counsel to do it for you and fight a protracted battle against highly-paid corprate lawyers.
So, a letter to a website or software project leader can be as effective as a trial, because the assumption is, you are too poor to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in expenses to fight to protect your freedom of speech. Because 99.999% of the time, it is obvious to anyone that the company in question has virtually no basis for their allegiations and the potential lawsuit would be totally frivilous, yet they hold this enormous power over people with few financial resources to fight a court battle that they shouldn't even be dragged into in the first place.
Corporations use this as a weapon against all who oppose them. Piss them off....and a letter from their legal department will follow. It costs them a few dollars to have their guys fill out a form letter and post it and it protects their precious company image from all of those who wish to exercise their rights as human beings to present crticism, satire and counterpoint to the multibillion dollar PR juggernauts these companies run.
It's sick, it's sad, but there is little you can do.
But one thing you can try, is to pick out any errors in their threats. Run it by someone who knows about legal procedure. Do they say you are barred from revealing the contents of the legal threat to anyone else? (to protect their image, no doubt). Well, fuck them. Unless they have a court order, there is no way they can impose such terms on you. Did you sign an agreement with them? No? Then let people know what they are doing. Write a letter to their state bar assoication's ethics department. Do this every single time for any **valid** reason you can scrounge up. Eventually, the complaints might just pile up.
It's our only hope against these tyrants.
Sad, but true.
...these particular cases don't worry me too much. Consider:
Let's face it, folks: there is no right to anonymity. Check the Constituion if you want. It's not there. Come to think of it, there's no right to privacy either, but that's a different debate. The whole notion of rights is based on assumptions about responsible use of those rights; check Locke et al for that one. The right to free speech does not imply the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater (Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think); similarly, it does not imply the right to commit libel or breach a valid confidentiality clause in an employment contract. Non-competes might be unenforceable, but that's totally irrelevant; the validity of confidentiality as a term of any valid contract has never been seriously challenged in the courts.
Now, should employers be able to punish employees for statements made on their own time, at their own expense (if any), that are neither libelous nor a breach of confidentiality? That's a whole different question. So far the answer is no, and so far the law still recognizes that. Don't count on that lasting very long, but that's the way it is today; none of the case in the article imply otherwise. The only thing that's threatened by such precedence is the non-existent but much-presumed right to be an anonymous asshole, and the quicker people learn that they have no such right the better.
P.S. For those who are using this as an excuse to go on an anti-corporatist rant, consider this: if a company posted 14,000 defamatory messages about an employee, they'd be just as liable. The only reason we don't hear about such cases is that such behavior requires a certain level of obsession, and companies tend toward a shortage rather than an excess of attention paid to employees.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
"There's nothing wrong with standing on a street corner with a megaphone saying that my ex-employer laid me off and I think they suck for doing so.."
Yes, but it WOULD be wrong if you stood out front and said that they were homophobes, or discriminated against women, and it WAS NOT TRUE. Just like it would be illegal for your employer to post on the front of their web site that you were fired for peddling kiddie porn via corporate servers, and were really just laid off because the company was running out of money.
The street works both ways. Neither of theirs are cases in which someone was out there spreading the truth in a journalistic intent, these cases are merely sophomoric harassment, and garner no protection under our laws.
Well, it looks like I'm finished.
Today the US Supreme Court held an unprecedented press conference, clarifying certain important issues in the Constitution.
"After completing several years of scholarly research and deliberation, it turns out we were wrong. The First Amendment is actually all about a FREE PEACH." said head Justice William H. Rehnquist.
"So therefore," continued Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "we will be issuing no further judgements that allow anyone to say what they want." She paused to take a large noisy bite from a delicious peach and let the juice run down her chin. "Mmm, free peach." Justice Clarence Thomas nodded in agreement as he recalled the beautiful peach groves in his home town of Savannah Georgia.
"In fact, anyone who wants to say something, will have to pay us first. The highest bidder will win any case that comes before us." O'Connor added between mouthfuls. "It was quite amusing to think that we actually wasted so much time and split so many hairs on this subject before. Now the free market can work its magic."
The Supreme Court also will soon be issuing notices to all newspapers and web sites, informing them that they are now under control of the government.
Furthermore, all peach growers will be subsidized by the government, so that all citizens may enjoy their right to free peach.
Anyone criticizing these changes will be shot.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.