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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.""
I can see Slashdot's new business model...
(just kidding...)
I think sterner measures need to be taken. Such as having spammers and trolls fight to the death in a pit for our amusement.
That you've resorted to trolling a pest-control web site?
To make your analogy more accurate. The homeless man was going into the restraunt, goosing the waitresses, yelling and throwing stuff until the customers left.
Once you visit someone elses site you abide by THIER rules. You want free speach? Make your own site then you can say whatever you want.
Actually, by signing up for that forum he accepted an agreement that he could be banned for hateful speech, etc. When he did so, he then (This is what I'm getting from the story) ban evaded and did it some more.
You can scream 'FARK THE USA' on the street all you want... just don't go into corner store and start doing it.
I am a filthy pirate.
Being a jerk shouldn't be illegal / a suable thing.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
And if he kept sneaking into my business to do his musical number, I have the right to have him charged for tresspassing.
Freedom of speech does not mean you get to use other people's property (in this case, a website) to practice it.
But then again, I could be wrong.
"It sounds in part that this [lawsuit] highlights the lack of public spaces on the Internet," Seltzer said. "I would be more comfortable saying they could kick off whoever they wanted if there was someplace else they could tell him to go."
:)
He doesn't get out much, does he?
When you open your site up to anyone, and make the process of getting an account public and easily accessable, you've just created a public space. The vast majority of web-based message boards are this way. No identity verification, no scrutinized application process, no requirements (except possibly vowing that you're over 18). The act of getting an account on these boards is almost totally geared toward providing a constant on-line identity in the forums, but it has nothing to do with who you are in meatspace.
That being said, I'm fine with this lawsuit. It takes money and resources to create such a forum, even if it's free to use. I'm posting on Slashdot's dime right now, in fact.
There are plenty of places for boneheads to go. Selzer's particular place has been targetted for asshole bombardment, and that sucks.
Maybe he should implement a Karma scheme?
GMFTatsujin
I've run message boards in the past - there are always a few bad apples, and I inevitably got/get others saying
"I'm on board X (running software Y) and they just ban someone - you're stupid cause you can't ban someone."
I try to stress to people you CAN NOT ban someone technically in forums on the internet. Well, not easily. Certainly without putting up roadblocks which just annoy the rest of the people.
What can you do?
1. Require username/password - unless these are paid for, it's hard to stop people from registering
2. Require a reply to email (or click on a link) to verify an email address. Big deal - so I know you know how to open a hotmail account.
3. Track IPs and ban on that - great, except for people on dialups, or shared systems, or mobile people.
4. Require moderators to review and approve all posts before they go out. Most reliable, but requires increasing staff time/cost as traffic grows.
There is NO foolproof way to stop this sort of stuff. I hope this suit sends a message to those trolls who waste/abuse resources and do not heed polite requests to play by the rules the rest of us follow.
I'm normally not in favor of legal tactics, and generally favor technical answers to technical problems, but this isn't a technical problem. It's a behavioural one, and we have a legal system in place to deal with bad/wrong/illegal behaviour.
creation science book
Jon Katz, a freelance writer and dog enthusiast, was arrested and jailed with no bail for attempting to delete an old work of his that falls under the new anti-troll act.
If found guilty, his punishment could range anywhere from a fine of $500 to a sentence of 2 years of jail time during which he would be forced to read his old Slashdot articles 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, until released.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
1. build popular website, attracting many thousands of trolls
2. sue trolls, total=$5k*(number of trolls)
3. profit!!!
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I think this is a cut and dry case of a company prematurely jumping into a matter whole, hog.
Any system or forum administrator worth his salt could easily block a range of IP addresses as well as some of the more popular proxy servers that allow deviant trolls to sneak through and continue posting.
Just look at Slashdot and Kuro5hin. Rob and Rusty both, respectfully, understand the dynamics of Web communities and know that court isn't how to solve trivial little troll problems. All you do is give a person a very friendly time out period during which they can't post and you're home free.
The problem here is not trolls or Internet arguers. The problem here is talent, and this pest control company doesn't have anyone in their IT department with half a brain.
K5 and Slash are still running strong through years of low budgets, high troll/contributor ratios, and Dot Com busts. It's not rocket scientry, folks, it's just simple, kind administration on the part of Rusty and Rob Malda.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
When you sue someone, you are generally not limited to recovering actual damages. You can sue for punitive damages as well, to deter the defendant (and others like him) from repeating his actions in the future -- which would require further intervention of the legal system.
Depending on how much time and effort (and legal bills) GIE has invested to keep him off their forums, and how much damage their reputation has lost because of the trolls on their forums, I can believe $5000 is the actual damages. An organization I work with has persistent trolls, and we spend a huge amount of time to remove them when they act up.
I wonder, though, if GIE has talked to the guy's ISP(s) and reported him for abuse. In my experience, that is much more effective than trying to unmask and sue someone over the Internet.
The idea that a commercial entity can incur an actionable loss because of the freedom of speech is a new and dangerous trend in our society
No it isn't. It's called private property and the principle has been around just as long as the first amendment. If you make noise on my property, I can kick you off. No questions. If you make noise in the street, I can't do anything about it. The web site could easily be considered private property and posting to the site would require the visitors abide by the terms of use. If they don't fine, they have to go do their own website.
This has nothing to do with corporate entities imposing censorship. It has everything to do with private property and the user thereof.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
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.
creation science book
What "rules"? You want rules now on the Internet? Are you insane?
/. does to ACs (oh, you didn't know? You can't post more than 10 posts a day; they log your IP; they don't respond to emails even though they throw a form up; in the chances that you do, they are clueless with their own error IDs; so if you "catch up" on /. for a week, you're screwed even if all you post are URLs for others to find additional info).
If the government and corporations had their way, they'd slam down every irate customer or voter out there.
Look, site manager's know this--you moderate or you don't. You require logins or you don't. If it's private site, then they can restrict him by the moderation or login requirements and a site usage agreement. If it's a public forum, then it's a public forum. He has the right to express himself on their site; they have the right to restrict him through blocking, etc., just as
It's amazing the number of sites that get by without using federal law to help them, and yet you somehow find validity in this absolutely frivolous BS argument of "play by the rules." It's their forum. It's theirs to manage. If they can't, that's their stinkin problem. You EASILY have more solutions, strategies, and recourse than real life physical moderation, and in the latter case, most of us would not stand our free speech rights being slammed shut (of course, there are numerous limits you could site, but the general scenario of a fellow on the street corner with a sign in front of a business is legal expression, despite the many laws, usually local, regarding conduct, profanity, slander, libel, disorderly conduct, etc.).
Play by the rules. Gee whiz. Down the page, you have network associates stifling reviews of their own product, which they release for sale to the public. Pathetic that the legality of such conduct is even in play, and you want now to "play by the rules." Yeah, you and what other obstinate whiners?
I think it's a bad thing, and they could've taken more measures (even as
Why? Why in the world should they have to hire moderators or anything else to get rid of some a$$hole who has nothing better to do with his time?
If he came into their physical place of business and did that, they'd be expected to ask him to leave and not come back (like they did on the web). Failing that, they'd be well within their rights to have him arrested for tresspass and thrown in jail. On the web, they just sued him.
Personally, I think the troll should get paddled in public until blisters form, but that's not a legal option in the U.S.
A troll of this nature is no better than someone who sits down at other partie's tables in a restarant and starts spewing obscenities for no apparent reason night after night.
I do have a problem with ISPs limiting what users can say on their personal website, but that doesn't mean other people's websites should be used instead.
The very act of requiring registration ends up cutting down the number of posts a web site receives. I know that I hardly ever post on a web site that requires registration, Slashdot is pretty much the exception for me. I wouldn't have even registered on Slashdot if it required me to put down easily identifiable personal information.
Even if the website in question did have people register, it would have needed a sure way to identify registrants, such as by credit card number. It said in the article that the troll's username was banned but the guy snuck back under other names. Unless they could find a sure way to identify the guy (such as Microsoft's Passport **shudder**), they couldn't stop the guy from posting.
It comes down to this: require people to totally identify themselves (thus causing them to ignore the site), or take the chance that you won't get trolled and leave the site open to all. Trolls are the ones that are driving stuff like Passport and national ID numbers, if people didn't abuse the privacy that certain forums provide then there wouldn't be a need to pin people down with big brother tactics.
Sapere aude!
Make trolls foes, and No More Trolls (544787) a friend; then in Comment Options set foe and foes of friends to -6.
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...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I sent this story to Slashdot because I thought it was interesting and relevant; this was my first story submission although I've been reading parts of the site for a couple of months. Since the story was in a regional paper, the business section to boot, I didn't think too many nerds would have spotted it. Right now, though, after looking at what has been posted on the board, I regret sending it in. This is a community of people engaged in an activity who use a board to learn more about their profession and to communicate with other souls. Personally, mass extermination of pests is not something I advocate. But I think that legal questions aside, the flooding of the board with obscenities is, putting it mildly, unkind. If their suit violates first amendment rights, it will fail in the courts. Bombing the board with crap achieves no positive goal.