Web Site Sues Annoying Pest Troll

kongjie writes "Cleveland's The Plain Dealer has a story in the business section about a pest-control web site that is suing someone who obviously has a particular bone to pick with exterminators: he is accused of being a "troll" who "constantly leaving obnoxious and offensive messages" on their pest-control bulletin board. The suit is for $5,000 and is for "violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.""

Comments

Wrong

[mgkimsal2]

They've simply refused to put themselves in a constantly reactive state. They are taking some action to establish a precedent that you must abide by their TOS, or face REAL consequences, not simply 'you can't post for 2 hours' or some other slap on the wrist.

PCT seems to be an association or industry portal of some sort - they're servicing a number of pest control companies. Their forum users aren't there to get into popularity contests with 'friends/foes' and moderation totals and all that crap - they're there to exchange business information. Other 'social engineering' answers simply burden the rest of the users who are abiding by the rules.

Block by IP and you potentially block other members. Require moderator approvals and you lose the 'real time' aspect of the forum.

IT people want to look for technical solutions to this because it keeps them in a position of power. If this lawsuit is successful, you won't have to rely on your IT people as much to keep a lid on technical problems. There will hopefully be one more precedent which establishes that 'stop' means 'stop', and there will be a financial penalty for failing to comply.

Re:Maybe it'll help, but I doubt it

[fearless_froggie]

Since only the Troll can see his posts, there will be no followups, unless the Troll replies to his own posts. I think it's a brilliant idea. The Troll isn't going to try to get around a ban, since he's not banned. His posts are there for everybody to see -- or at least he thinks so. Then when he doesn't get any reponses to his posts, he's going to get bored and go away.

EFF's Seltzer Misses The Point Badly

[billstewart]

I was surprised to see a comment this mistaken from the EFF. Yes, there are lots of private spaces on the Internet, and if you don't like the ones that are there, you can build your own, because unlike the radio/tv broadcast spectrum, which is nationalized in most countries, either for government use or for use by officially permitted oligopolies, the Internet *is* free public space. You can get any domain name that isn't currently in use, and if you want to be http://www.pest-control-troll.org, the name's available. You can connect to anywhere on the internet, and anybody who wants to can connect to you. The internet originally didn't _have_ public space on it - it was all government-controlled - but the Commercial Internet Exchange and its successors changed that, and some of the EFF's founders were important participants in that. The public space depends on cooperation of everybody who wants to participate in it - if you don't like it, you can go start your own Arpanet over on 10.x.x.x and only invite your friends, or go hide on 127.0.0.1 and not invite anybody, but if you want a richer and more interesting public space, you have to build more of it and invite the public in, because that't how things get built around here. Telling other people that you don't like the gift horse they've given the public isn't the way to get it.

The existence of public space doesn't mean that anybody's obligated to show up at your web site and listen to you, or that anybody's SMTP server is obligated to accept your requests to connect to their Port 25*, any more than the existence of public parks and legality of soapboxes means that anybody's obligated to stick around and listen to you rant about space aliens' plots to destroy us all with volcanoes, but if you've gotten thrown out of the pub because you were rudely yelling at everybody about why they should buy canned meat from you, the commons and the high seas are still public space. The internet works through cooperation, and if nobody wants to cooperate with you because you won't cooperate with them, well, perhaps their lives are drearier for it, or perhaps not.

There are ways in which private groups are trying to take over public space. Various proposals for "internet drivers' licenses" and various governments' restrictions on their citizens' free speech and freedom to read are obvious examples. Australia's attempts to extend local defamation law around the world are especially disturbing, given the number of regimes that make "defaming the state" illegal. ICANN's main objective seems to be to assert trademark-owners' control over the namespace, and secondarily to make sure that some service providers always make money on namespace, rather than to provide technical management and high-quality implementations. You can see this especially in their insistence that registrars get your True Name and True Subpoena-Delivery Address for whois records and publish them, rather than insisting that your Technical and Administrative email addresses go somewhere that doesn't bounce and maybe even get a human to respond. Some big ISPs periodically try to attract customers to a Walled Garden that doesn't really access the full Internet, and the market gradually tells them that people want more than that - that's why AOL now lets you fetch real web pages as well as AOL-provided content, and cellphone WAP systems aren't getting the respect their purveyors expected, so they're trying to find better ways to get real Internet content and not just newswires. The cable modem companies are the big exceptions right now, by trying to prevent their users from running "servers" from home (there were initially some technical reasons for this, but it was always basically the fear that they might not be in control.) That hasn't killed them all yet, though @Home's really dead, and their quasi-monopoly status and TV-content-pusher background has made it take longer for them to realize that they need active users to generate interesting content and develop the Killer Apps that will make everybody else buy cable modem, but they'll get there. The kinds of people who want to tell Google how to rank their pages because everybody uses Google to search the web are another example, not realizing that the reason that everybody uses Google is *because* of the way they rank their pages, and if they want to have a "politically correct web search ranking" system, which is really just an outlet for their own speech and ideas, they should use the Internet's public-space capability, set out their own soapbox with a big "politically correct searches here" sign over it, and hope the public shows up.

* There's a corrolary to Godwin's Law which says that all discussions that don't trigger the primary form of it will eventually devolve into discussions about spam.... But then Godwin also used to be an EFF lawyer...