Slashdot Mirror
CPA Googles For His Name, Sues Google For Libel
fbform writes "Mark Maughan, an accountant, searched Google for his name on March 25 2003 and found some 'alarming, false, misleading and injurious' information about himself and his firm. Therefore, he is now suing Google, Yahoo (which used Google as its search engine at the time), AOL (for using Google to enhance its search results) and Time Warner (because they're the same company as AOL) for libel. Specifically, his lawyer John Girardi believes that Google's PageRank algorithm takes known good information and twists its context when displaying search results."
I think it should be manditory for people to know how things work before they can sue someone. I realize why this guy's suing (it wasn't HIS lisence revoked) but seriously. He should be given the job to check over the 3 billion pages google has for libel.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Google's PageRank algorithm takes known good information and twists its context
Yeah it isn't like lawyers to do that is it?
I called several of my business' competitors, and asked them for their opinion on my company, and they said they were better! This is outrageous!
He just wants some free publicity. Seriously, this will be good for his business.
Tort reform, anyone?
hey
If this guy gets any money.... actually, if this guy gets any money, it will only continue the current legal trends.
However, I was going to say that if this guy gets any money our legal system will have gone kaput. This is like suing a library for providing books which contain recommendations against your products. It's also like suing me for giving you a book with the same information.
What a great example of shooting the messenger... how pathetically ridiculous.
Oh, and is this guy actually suing the parties responsible for the creation of the socalled 'defamatory content'? Probably not, seeing as how they are broke due to doing business with a poor accountant.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
No it doesn't.
Libel requires intent only if the figure in question is a public figure.
Anyway, here's what I was going to post... Can this CPA add up 2 and 2? If there is libelous information on the Internet, and he wishes to pursue litigation, then he should go after the persons responsible for the information. Google is only an index, making the information on the Internet easily available for access. Without Google (and perhaps without similar search engines), it would be all but impossible to find anything useful on the Internet.
In fact, I think the aforementioned CPA should THANK Google for making it possible for him to FIND the offending information, so that he can take action against whomever he should take action. Without Google, the alleged libel might have been posted all over the Internet and our friend the CPA would never have been any the wiser.
I further think there is no basis in law for suing an index for pointing to information. On the contrary, I think this was tested in court quite a few times (in all those trials against linking to pages within a site) and it was decided that you can link to whatever the heck you want to link to.
Therefore, I think this CPA is making a stupid decision, and I believe the case will get dismissed. I hope Google countersues for legal fees. And wins.
Oh yeah, and did I mention I'm a Supreme Court Justice? Yeah, the Supreme Court of Bullshit.
The mental midget known as Mark Maughan, who has only been a member of his local CPA association for about a year, is just out to get some easy cash by trying to make it more expensive for Google to fight him in court. CPAs normally make ass-loads of money, so I guess he must be really crappy at his job if he needs the money this badly.
Talk about digging for gold... His claim is pretty outrageous. Some people will do just about anything for money or publicity.
Buckethead
You can't sue for Libel, or slander if the information is TRUE. This Mark fellow will lose big and fast and hard and deservingly.
What triggered this post was "how much of it was true" -- Spytap is right. If true, Mark M. is up the creek w/o a lawsuit. If false, well thats not Google's problem.
Nope. Without some form of page rank (where links count), search engine results would have to be based entirely on the content of the page - those were the really bad old days of hidden text, stuffed title tags, and the imfamouse "meta tags". I have a feeling some form of page rank will be with us for a long, long time.
Everyone should look at this as a lesson.
Talk about bad things being said about him... He just gave everything credence by bringing up those ridiculous lawsuits. At the end of the day, he is going to look 10 times worse than the Google results alone could make him appear... Add to that, that it is going to be much more widely known?
I mean, honestly... Does this guy think that the slim chance of getting lots of cash out of these companies is really worth the REAL damage this is going to do to him and his company?
Lawyers that represent frivelous lawsuits are scummy... The People that hire the lawyers are scummier.
From what I read in the article, it's not PageRank that produced the libelous comments but the summary view of the linked-to pages.
... is a criminal"
Ie, when searching for the two words:
"Bloater" "criminal"
a page that rightly proclaims:
"Bloater thinks that any murderer is a criminal"
can be summarised as "Bloater
If this is the case, then just as a the author of an anagram generator does not issue libelous statements, but the "user" does, it is in fact Mark Maughan himself that generated these alleged libelous statements by instructing a peice of search_and_summarise software to search and summarise by cutting out non matching text using some continuation marker such as "..." just as it normally does and he and everybody else expects it to.
"Something that was demontrably true."
Actually, in the Liberace case, it was true, but NOT demonstrable (demonstrateable?). Which is why he won the case. In many juristdictions (Europe), simplistically speaking, the burden of proof is on the defendant in a libel case.
A librarian is a bad example, because Google doesn't even understand what a person is...it's just a pattern-matching algorithm. You make them sound like some kind of a malevolent agent that refuses to stop telling big mean 'ol nasty lies...the truth of the matter is that Google just scans for whatever words you put in it, and if someone is publishing information that contains those words, it's going to turn up.
Furthermore, there are so many people in the world with any given name there's no expectation that just giving google a name is enough to be sure you're going to be talking about the same person.
This is like looking in the card catalog for your name and then suing the library for libel.
Don't be so quick to knock ridiculous metaphors, you had a really ridiculous one and you didn't seem to understand what was going on at all.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Excuse me, but if you went through the trouble of going to court with this, why did you not take it all the way? I mean, you won $1000, why did you call THEM asking for satisfaction? Why not take further legal action? I'm sorry, but if a company owes me that kind of money, I'm going to get it.
The next part is even more unbelievable. As big as SBC is, I highly doubt that some low level bill supervisor cares about your lawsuit and complaints enough to perform highly illegal actions (of which you have written, documented proof in your bill). Even more ludicrous is that a high level manager would care about something so petty as $1000 to fuck with you. Then, even if this did happen, why did you not take those bills to the Better Business Bureau or to small claims court again?
All of this sounds like urban legend... even the $1000. I would guess that a judge would fine them the amount you paid to have your phone unlisted, then ordered them to take your name out of the next version of the phone book.
IANAL, but I play one on
Secondly, there is a trade-off between innovation in law and the loser-pays system. It's recognized that novel legal approaches are rarely taken in countries where the loser pays. It just makes sense that not only those with poor cases, but also those with good cases based on new interpretations or new law will be wary of bringing suit in such a system.
The U.S. is the only common law country without a loser-pays rule, but it is also recognized that such legal innovation, when eventually adopted in other common law countries, usually happens here first due to this issue.
The loser pays system has advantages, but it can be abused just as easily as the current system. Plaintiffs with a valid case will be a bit gunshy about bringing their case against a major corporation. If they are lucky enough to find a lawyer willing to take the case and assume the risk, there is still the off chance that they could lose the case and be assigned enormous fees. Companies with plenty of resources would be encouraged to fight all court cases under this system, as they would incur minimal court costs in a loss, and could possibly profit from a win.
He needs to take this up with the original posters of this information. You can sue someone for libeling you (hopefully if it's not true), but you can't sue Xerox for printing the copy.
Stupid fscking lawsuits. How about this - don't be an asshole and you'll have nothing to worry about to begin with - END OF LINE.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The system the grandparent suggests is not really "loser-pays". He is not suggesting that in all civil suits, the loser pays the winner's legal fees. He's saying that the first priority of the court should be to see if the case has merit. If it does, then each party pays their own fees. If the case is found to be without merit (equivelent to the judge hearing it, then chucking it straight out, I would assume) then the person with the stupid case has to pay.
I think this is a great idea; firstly, it would keep the legal costs paid out down - the "loser" would only have to pay for the costs of the beginning of the trial, before the issue of merit is decided, rather than for the whole huge case. Secondly, it would only punish frivilous cases, not cases where it was close, but one party won by dint of lawyer, or something like that.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Honestly, if you can sue P2P "search engines" for finding music in which they ultimately do not control who downloads or not, why not sue a normal search engine for all the pirated material, warez and serialz? Why not sue them for libel since they're propagating false and slanderous information while you're at it?
It's always a riot to see hypocrisy and lawsuit abuse come head to head. What a wonderful standard the RIAA has set for us.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Permit loser-pays up to the loser's own costs or some pre-set minimum (otherwise lawyers acting as own counsel will be able to get away with paying one dollar every time).
:-)
In fact, it should just be "loser pays winner amount of loser's costs". If I sue MS and lose, I pay a few hundred or whatever. If MS pays me and loses, I get lawyer fees for their entire legal department on top of my award.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Isn't that what a search engine is supposed to do? I mean, if you search for a concept on the web, you should find what people believe is the relevant content for that term... it's not hijacking. It's simply reflecting the terms people use to refer to a particular page.
To say that Google needs to do something about this is silly. The algorithms are working as intended. If you disagree with the opinion of the people making the connection between the term and the page, well, take it up with the people making the links or make your own links to the "right" place.
Sujal
politics, food, music, life: FatMixx
From a government site ? The California Board of Accountancy. Nice
He should sue the State of California for making this information public. Next we will see felons who have been released from prison suing the government who have their criminal actions on their permanent record.
I think it may be time for the US to seriously consider implementing a "Loser Pays" system in civil court. Basically, if you, as a lawyer, pursue what is found to be suit with insufficient legal merit, then you are liable for all the costs of the case, including the other sides fees, plus any penalty the court finds suitable.
IAAL, and you seem a little confused as to what a "Loser Pays" system is.
A "loser pays" system is one in which the losing litigant, not the lawyer for the litigant, pays the attorney's fees and court costs of the prevailing side. This is also known as "fee-shifting".
Such a system seems to have an intrinsic appeal to certain people, particularly to those who really don't understand how the U.S. legal system works.
The U.S. legal system is a combination of statutes and judge-made law. A large amount of U.S. law is judge-made, particularly in the area of tort, and new legal theories and new causes of action are an important part of the development of that kind of law.
Right now, U.S. citizens enjoy a liberal civil justice system in which any person may make a claim in good faith. The price for that system is that there are some who will abuse it.
A general "loser pays" approach would of course stifle that process of creating new law. It can be argued that is appropriate, since legislation should be the prerogative of legislatures. However, with more and more legislators coming from non-legal backgrounds, and the increasing nastiness and contentiousness of politics, statutes are becoming more complex and often require interpretation, which means that somebody, somewhere, has to make certain arguments about matters for which there isn't any precedent as of yet. Judge-made law is thus unavoidable, if only as a matter of interpretation.
So you see, a "loser pays" system creates a problem. We already have laws that allow recoveries against people who file meritless lawsuits or who prosecute an action in bad faith. But if the U.S. legal system had always employed a "loser pays" approach, many legal decisions that we now take for granted could never have happened; for instance, the NAACP would have been bankrupted by their many losses long before Brown v. Board of Education.
Now in reading the post I am responding to, I cannot help but think that the poster operates under the misconception that attorneys have some crystal ball that allows them to know whether a client has a meritorious case when the client comes in and hires the attorney, prior to the conduct of discovery or a hearing or anything else. You wouldn't want an attorney have to prejudge YOUR case, I assure you. An attorney is a hired expert, not a judge or jury. It is clients that drive litigation, not attorneys. The litigiousness of U.S. society is a direct result of both the increasing assumption of power by the judicial branch, which encourages the seeking of judicial rather than legislative or private solutions to social problems, and the expansion of legislation of all kinds that began in the mid-20th century, a result of a "progressive" mindset that sees legislation/State coercion as the solution to persistent human problems. More law makes more litigation, it's just that simple.
Yes, the fact that there are so many attorneys in the U.S. now, and that they are all hungry for work, means that litigants have far more access to our overburdened courts than they used to. But the reason that there are so many more attorneys is that the policy of the courts and state governments has been to increase competition in the legal services field in the public interest. There are more law schools than there once were. Various court decisions going back to the '60's prohibited minimum fee schedules, non-compete agreements, and other anti-competitive practices between lawyers.
I am not saying that there shouldn't be reform, but a universal "loser pays" system is a cure that is worse than the disease. Eliminating conti
Huh?
Check out this page which is promoting bombing Michael Moore. I use this page as it is a nice antithesis to the Bush search. I don't care whom it refers to, just that it is wrong.
From the site:
Once you have signed up construct a simple website, fill it up with your shopping list, a log of what you had for lunch or whatever, it doesn't matter (or how about a nice Glenn Beck fan site, but please
When you update your website, which should be a couple of times a week, be sure to include the following HTML at some point:
These people are clearly Not providing content, but Are Tricking Google. And they(Google) Should do something about it.
The algorithm is working as well as it's supposed to. People are generating content in the sense that they are posting an opinion on the web about Michael Moore and the search term. Why is that Google's problem?
Sujal
politics, food, music, life: FatMixx
Why is that Google's problem?
Well initially it's my problem: I type in what I'm looking for, I'm not getting the sites which would be suitable for the query (or I'm getting results which are buried under lots of other stuff). The result of that is Google's problem: I'm using other search engines - once enough people do that it decreases their ad revenue.
I personally see this as a Huge Growing Problem that will rival Email Spam and Virii/Worms in the coming months as a detriment to productivity/commerce/etc on the internet.
That's very nice but you still haven't identified what the Huge Growing Problem us or why it will be detrimental to anything. If a huge number of people do claim a relationship between the term "Miserable Failure" and Michael Moore (or George Bush, 1810c, Jesus Christ or even Ralph Yarro) then why shouldn't Google reflect that?
I can see concern about a single site being able to hijack search terms, that's a genuine problem imho, but if lots of people link a particular term with a particular subject, even if they do so consciously rather than subconsciously, then it seems entirely appropriate for it to show up in the search results.
Can you think of any harm that's been caused so far? If so then please give examples, or is it just that you envisage harm to come? If so then please give putative examples. I'd really like to understand your point.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
Terms of service
There's a long bit about disclaiming responsibilities, limitation of liability etc. IANAL so perhaps someone could read through the legalese and provide some insight?
Hold on a second. The obvious anwer may be 'NO' but it is not the correct answer. One of the greatest things about Google (and the web) is that you can find opinions that don't usually get mainstream visibility.
If you want to know what the NYT or some other mainstream news provider thinks then restrict your search to their site.
If you are searching for X and get a bunch of links to 'Anti X' then spend some time and learn how to refine your search. (Not your complaint but mentioned above.)
I could see Google allowing you to build a profile of sites that you view as important/trustworthy (or building one for you as you surf) but to suggest that this profile is somehow appropriate for everyone is a more than a little self-centered. Maybe you could pick a canned profile and work from there.
The idea behind page rank is that the links determine the significance of the site. If the current implementation of page rank is being abused then I'm sure Google will make attempts to change the implementation to prevent the abuse. Whether or not they succeed is anyone's guess.
Looks like he didn't read Google's terms of service...
IANAL, but this seems to be saying that they are not liable for anything Google serves up.
Not at all. All the TOS means is that if HE looks something up on Google, they aren't responsible for the accuracy of what they serve HIM. But that isn't what he's complaining about. He's complaining that if ANYONE ELSE googles him, Google is libeling him to THEM. This would happen even if he never went to the Google site, and never saw the TOS. Terms of service cannot possibly be binding on a third party.
1.) the economy was already in decline in 4Q -2000
2.) the "bubble" was already in decline 1Q-2001
3.) 9/11 happened causing untold damage to an already declining economic problem that the President inhereted.
The facts are without question.
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13