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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."
Googling for "litigious schmuck" now turns up a new entry...
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Google's PageRank algorithm takes known good information and twists its context
Yeah it isn't like lawyers to do that is it?
Hey everybody, I heard that Mark Maughan once killed a man in Reno just to watch him die!
He also has poor math skills and failed basic algebra twice.
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?
Last i checked Libel required some form of intent since google's results are computer generrated by the web spiders where the intent do the spiders have it out for him?
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)
This page seems to list some disciplinary action taken against his law firm. I quote from the "Cause for Discipline" column (all emphasis mine):
For purposes of settlement, Respondent admits the truth and accuracy of the allegations and charges in the Accusation. Respondent and his accountancy corporation engaged in the practice of public accounting with expired licenses.
Respondent additionally failed to pay an administrative fine imposed by the Board for failing to supply the Board with copies of a financial report representing the highest level of service rendered, in accordance with Section 89.1 of the California Code of Regulations. Respondent's failure to pay the administrative fine caused the Board to withhold renewal of his CPA license.
Sounds like someone knew they'd have no luck taking on the state and decided to try and get some quick cash out a Google. Nice try.
The reason he is suing is because "Surrender of license accepted." is shown in the description, while it actually is carried over from a section on the page which doesn't refer to his company. Though if you view the page you'll see that the company is actually on probation for 3 years. The site linked to is actually http://www.dca.ca.gov. Now, apparently, this guy thinks that if Google sampled some of the results on the page, and accidentally showed that, Google is somehow responsible for libel.
Personally, I think he's insane, but I can see his position on this because it does look misleading. I just hope he doesn't win anything.
You mean this technology I presume...
DrkBr
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.
When google gives wrong info on me(other people have same name), i just add their stuff to my resume.
I gained a dance school and a few civil war books in my resume experiences.
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.
Joking aside, the information he's unhappy about being listed for him included a .ca.gov site (which lists disciplinary proceedings). So it's already a matter of public record. I think he's suing because this is the first hit, which he claims is misleading. Well, it's in a public database - I actually think Google is doing us a service.
Any competent judge will throw this out right away, same as happened to that Search King dickwad.
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
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.)
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..."
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