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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."
Wonder if this will add strength to his case?
I think you meant litigious schmuck
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Don't laugh. I did.
I requested, was charged for and I paid for an unlisted number. The phone company published my number anyway and I filed suit on them in small claims court. The phone company did not show up in court and I won a default judgement against them for $1,000.
They never paid me. And when I called them and demanded satisfaction, they began screwing me on my phone bills. My $29 a month phone bill suddenly exploded into $600 a month bills for bogus charges, bogus equipment, bogus repairs, bogus services and bogus installations. The more I complained the worse it got, when I refused to pay the bills they cut my phone off then charged me hundreds of dollars to reconnect it and HUGE deposits.
Fucking thieves SBC is.... I cut the wires at the pole and the house and rolled up the wire and kept it. I now use only a cell phone.
I will NEVER have a land line again.
BTW, I had previously had an unlisted number for over 15 years.
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.
If you as a lawyer don't believe that a case has merit, but the client wants to pursue the case, the lawyer can draw up a contract noting that the client has been advised that consuel believes the case does not have merit, and that they, the client, will bear the liability for all costs and penalties in the case.
The first thing that happens in a civil suit is that it is analyzed for merit, and if it found lacking, liability and fines are assessed.
Basically, it takes the profit motive for pursuing crappy cases out of the system. Why shouldn't lawyers pursue any case? Money is money.
And this still allows for anybody to pursue a case, but they have to assume the costs if the lawyer doesn't find any merit to the case.
You're quite right. When I worked at Oldsmobile the stock advice for getting ahead was to wreck a company car. Your name would appear in the monthly safety report sent to all managers. Later, when your name came up for promotion, the managers would remember that they'd heard of you, but not remember where.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I would think that it wouldn't be slander/libel if the person providing the "information" believed it to be true, or did not know it to be false. It's not illegal to be wrong, but you can sue someone for willfully presenting as true something they know to be false (lying,) for the purpose of injuring you in some way (defamation.)
As far as I know, you can't sue anyone for simply lying. (Holocaust denial, for example?) Truth-in-advertising is close to that, though it does contain a sense of profit/interest in the matter. (Defamation being assumed to provide advantages to the person lying.)
Put aside the joke and you have arguably one of the most powerful information tools in the history of internet (and the world?) being hijacked by it's own algorithms.
There have been numerous stories here and else ware lately about tricking Google. Things like this and those search engine Spam sites are seriously starting to skew the intent of a search engine (i.e., provide links to relevant pages)