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Star Wars Kid Cuts a Deal With His Tormentors
An anonymous reader writes "Ghyslain Raza, who gained instant online fame as the 'Star Wars Kid' settled this week with the families of the three classmates who posted his two minute Lucasfilm screen test on the Internet. No details were released but the suit sought damages of $351,000. A victory for the victims of cyber-bullying, or missed chance by thin-skinned Ghyslain to cash-in as the next William 'She Bangs' Hung?"
Furthermore, I doubt that it will prevent so-called cyberbullying; it will just remind the more intelligent bullies to wreak their mischief anonymously.
When I think of all the bullies I had to deal with growing up, back in the pre-Web days, and the revenge I could have gotten by spoofing them on a website, well, I guess I'm glad I didn't have that opportunity to do something so easy that would haunt me the rest of my life. It would have been fun, though.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
That is the main difrence the kid had this put on him not buy his own choice
I still think got lemons bla bla you know
Did this kid?
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I would hope for the other way round, but unfortunately it won't happen.
The kids who posted this without thinking how it would affect his life are the ones who should be learning from this.
Fame is a fickle thing, some people try their whole lives to get it, others try to stay away from it. Being forced into a difficult situation IS bullying, and I hope this kid can grow out of his stereotype.
Everybody does stupid things, but to be reminded about them every single day must be hell.
liqbase
I only hope that other kids can learn from his situation and make the most of their own problems.
That lesson is: Temporary embarassment can lead to huge cash rewards!
The guys who stole (er, "misappropriated" this video and stuck it on the net for the sole purpose of humiliating this poor kid deserve to be punished, IMO, and here in the civilized world the way that people are punished for stuff like this is money; it's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've come up with so far.
They're just lucky they're not in the US -- the MPAA would have come down on them like the wrath of God for messing with this kid's copyright on his original work.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
had made of himself and left on a shelf in the school TV studio
case solved. plantiff guilty or embarrassing himself. we should not reward stupidity or accomdate it. the more accomodation, the more it appears. now this child/moron has learnd when things go against you, sue
"It's no fun what happened here, but that's the problem with the Internet. Things travel fast."
i believe thats a feature, not a problem. if it was as slow as the postal mail no one would use it for what it was designed...to quickly transmit data
at the risk of sounding un-sensitive, life sucks then you die. deal with it like everyone else or fast forward to the end
i don't care
Having been a rather akward teenager myself, I can understand why he decided to file suit against them. I don't know anything about this kid or how he feels about himself or even what he went through on an every day basis before this occured but I remember being in high school and feeling invisible to the rest of the world. Suddenly, one day to have myself posted all over the internet and being the subject of laughter, at the age of 15, would have been psychologically devestating to me. It is easy, for those of us who are adults, to be critical of his choices but we weren't the ones treated this way. We never walked in his shoes and never suffered the embarassment that he suffered.
On the outside, since we have no emotional attachment to the situation, it's easy for us to say "I'd ride that money train all the way to the bank" but that fails to give the situation its true weight. Being 15 is tough enough for most kids without having themeselves publically humilitated by their peers just for a few laughs. I'm not a huge fan of law suits in general, but in this instance I am. The action of these kids was not criminal but it was a terrible thing to do and there needs to be consequences.
Just for the record, does it stop being kinda funny when he kills himself or does it become REALLY funny then?
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Oh, get over yourself. I had heard about the "Star Wars Kid" many times before a friend introduced me to the videos (I didn't have broadband). The videos are just wonderful, and are NOT bullying to people like me. Sure, it must have been a good deal of embarassment, but now we have a set of videos that allow people to laugh WITH the Star Wars Kid, not at him. It's now part of the species fan filmia, which anyone can go out and capture when they feel the need for a good laugh.
The SWK will simply have to get over it all, and in fact should proudly take credit for his (unintentional) participation. Nerdy and overweight, he STILL did what he did out of his sheer love of the genre, and to a significant extent I'm sure the video producers did the same. As the years pass I hope he'll come to understand all that, and that it will take much of the sting out of the embarrassment he experienced. He's already made some money off the deal, so perhaps the maturing process has begun.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
... I would DEEPLY enjoy seeing bullies getting sued for their actions and seeing it stick. The problem lies in the fact that we're already an overly litigeous society and this would only make it far worse. I would like to see true bullies face some serious, life-changing, consequences for their actions, but I'd hate to see some skinny punk-ass kid think he (or his enterprising parents) could go around suing people for causing emotional distress.
I'd also like to lay a [un]healthy amount of blame on this kid's parents. First of all, if he weren't fat, I'd say that this might NEVER have happened. And even if not being obese could have prevented some of it, it's unquestionable that his obesity exacerbated the situation greatly. And whose fault is a child's obesity? Without a medical excuse, it's the parents. And only recently has the media started to actually pay some attention to the problem. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496200/) The damage done to a child who is obese is not just physical, but mental and emotional and the scars last for life. The damage resulting from childhood obesity alone could have been the root cause that made him so vulnerable to being bullied in the first place.
Nothing on the planet will stop all kids from potentially being bullied and/or being bullies themselves. It's actually part of the natural human condition. But adding to it through parental neglect is more than just a shame, it's child abuse and should be addressed criminally just as other forms of abusive/criminal neglect are.
There's not a single law possible to force someone to actually care about the feelings of other people.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
When you feel alienated from school and everyone laughs at you, you DON'T CHOOSE to drop out. You HAVE TO.
It seems to me that you really don't understand what free will is. Psychological pressure is a determinating factor, EVEN in murder trials. Can you say "temporal insanity"?
Of course, you haven't been ridiculized in public or bullied so what the heck do you know.
What the hell? Why are so many of the comments saying things like this? He somehow deserves what happened to him because he wasn't smart enough, wasn't confident enough, didn't take advantage, whatever. Has everyone on this website forgotten what it's like to be a socially inept, outcast 15-year-old? Sure, by and large we've grown out of it, but a lot of us would not have appreciated having something we consider completely humiliating broadcast to the entire world.
You "can't blame someone else because of your personal problems," but what if the problems in question (humiliation in front of a worldwide audience, constant attention from the media and from strangers, drastically increased bullying in school when he was already not the most popular kid around) are in fact a direct result of someone else's actions? Can't you blame them for those actions, especially when they were done maliciously?
Everyone seems to be talking about fame as though it's this wonderful gift. Here's a clue: Not everyone wants it. And not everyone should be forced to want it, just because it's your opinion that he should have seized the opportunity and made a few bucks. Maybe he prefers the lack of fame over any potential profit he could have gotten from it. I know I would hate to be famous. That's not a sour grapes thing, I do have an ego and I would like to be well-respected within my own field, but real fame? Have you seen what the world does to celebrities? It's disgusting, and I'm glad that there's no realistic way that would happen to me.
Should the kid have filed a lawsuit? Maybe not. Personally I would lean towards no. But there's a big gap between "a lawsuit is inappropriate here" and "What's the matter with this kid, he deserves what he got, why is this bullied, insecure 15-year-old acting so insecure and immature? He should just get over it." No doubt he will get over it, but give him a few years -- it took a lot of us that long even without a major roadblock like this.
[END RANT]
I am the man with no sig!
What bugs me is the lack of scope here. Okay so they sue the parents of some kids who released a video. Obviously these families are fucked for life because of this incredible debt. Who has 100k to laying around? Guess little Johnny isn't going to college now because of a childhood prank. That seems highly unfair.
Now in the real world, people at sites like fark, ebaumsworld, etc sold a whole lot of banner ads with this video. Why aren't they being sued? Or the graphics professionals who took a boring video of a fat kid from some website and added in effects and sounds, hosted it, and promoted it? Its one thing for me to release a video and its another for the video to get picked up by commercial interests and artists and turned into this week's crazy meme without permission. Ebaumsworld still hosts it now. Why are they free from litigation?
The real problems with these lawsuits is that they just get the easy money while fark and ebaumsworld and the rest continue this kind of nonsense. They dont ask permission, they don't ask the source, they just link and host and put all the banner ad money in their pockets. They're laughing all the way to the bank while some canadian families are now expected to get the 300k other people have made off this kid.
So "cyberbullies" get some sort of lesson, which probably won't resonate to the rest of the culture of bullying and website profiteers get off scott free. That's justice?
The really funny thing is the place with the highest nerd population on the net is making fun of this kid like if every /.er would just take the jokes graceously and learn how to laugh with them...
Spot on... after 3 years of daily beatings, I started tracking people down when they were heading home, alone, in the middle of the night... the beatings ended in a right big hurry and it was entertaining to see them become unwilling to be alone... anywhere, once you know what fear truely is you quit being so willing to inflict it on others. Someone who hasn't been through the beatings and torture can't even come close to understanding how that feels and the mental, emotional, and physical scars it leaves. A fist fight sucks and you might win might lose... a gang of people getting you down and beating you regularly is a whole different story. A bully understands one thing, pain, end of story, until they feel it they have no concept and they don't care... after they feel enough pain they lose intereste in dishing it out anymore. ever.
Shadus
"Learn to take a joke" is the rallying cry of people who humiliate someone else and don't want to take responsibility for it.
God is imaginary
Comments like yours remind me why I hate internet forums.
First of all, you took what he said out of content. even though he said what you posted. you completely overlooked the main focus of his post, and chose to dwell only what you took issue with - not because it was offensive, but because it hit a nerve with some unresolved issues that you have.
Those kids were just being kids, everyone in that situation would have done the same thing. I would say Raza should have thought how video taping this ridiculous video AND LEAVING IT IN THE SCHOOL TV STUDIO would affect his life. I mean, did he expect no one to see it there?
That would be the point. And guess what? Like it or not, it's true. Young boys have been doing things of this nature for years. Even kids who aren't bullies play pranks on each other sometimes. Not because they're evil - because they're kids. Truth be told, you don't know what the relationship was between the kids. That's today's ultra-sensitive society - everyone's having fun, until someone gets mad, tells their parents, and someone's getting sued. Half of the time the kids intentions weren't even how they tried to depict them as.
But that's not why I hate the internet. I can tolerate views that differ from mine with no problem. What I can't stand is the attitude that's reflected in the comment that you made:
Yeah, I know your type well, if you're what I think you are. How's the gas-pumping business, ya fucking jock?
I take online abuse on a regular basis from people like you, and I wasn't even a jock. Not because I'm rude, because people like you who hold these types of things in. They walk around fine, but the moment they get into a situtation of power, they're hell to deal with. Support forums are full of them all over the internet. You see, after years of being bullied, you have your safe haven where you can say whatever you like to whoever you like, and they just have to take it. Whether their power is in being a moderator, or in having a bunch of friends on the board, they frequently abuse it. They walk around all the time with a chip on their shoulder, making curt and semi-sarcastic, hoping someone says something back so they can let them have it or boot them from a room.
That "Internet John Wayne" crap isn't any less offensive or abusive than the kids that posted a silly dance tape on the internet. At least the kid recorded it himself.
I would think the negative media attention and the factor of strangers approaching Ghyslain on the street and making fun of him everywhere he goes takes this to another level.
I, too, was bullied in middle school and high school. And yes, it sucks. However, I could leave school and go someplace else where there were other kids and "start over" and probably not be bullied. For example, the other kids in my Boy Scout troop did not bully or make fun of me. When I was in high school, I often went to church activities. There were other kids there and I made friends and there were girls there that liked me, etc. When I was back in school, all the kids hated me and no girls were interested in me because of the ridicule I got from the other kids. So, I learned that the problem wasn't with me, it was with the bullies. And then I went to college and I was very popular.
Ghyslain can't do that. Every place he goes, people are going to know that he is the "Star Wars kid" and make fun of him. He will never have a chance to start over with a new peer group with a clean slate. And that's what makes it worse - and that's why I really feel sorry for him.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
...it doesn't really seem to me that those involved wanted to create this. For one they didn't create that, he did that of his own free will. The first guy found it, second guy digitized it, it got spread around a little on e-mail. Third guy says he didn't know the two others, just saw a funny clip passed around and made a website which got insanely popular. No, it wasn't nice. Yes, I probably would have done the same myself (and I got harassed at school so don't go all "you don't know what it's like" on me).
I mean, if these three had been working together to create this, then maybe. But this was more a case of pebbles starting an avalanche. Now I'm sorry the avalanche landed on Mr. Raza, but well... I don't think you should be punished for more than you intended to do, or reasonably could expect of consequences. It would be quite another thing if they were harassing him right up to the point where he freaked. But they dldn't, in fact they were as powerless to stop it themselves. Yes, someone found a funny tape and showed it to a buddy or two. That's not a $350000 offense.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why weren't they prosecuted if they were thieves? That's a criminal court's jurisdiction, not a civil court's.
"The little morons took something that wasn't theirs with the intent to cause harm"
What harm? He was embarassed, and frankly, if you think that's worthy of wasting a CIVIL court's time, then I'm wasting my time with you.
Here's what really happened. Rich brat does something stupid, tapes it, it gets out, he's embarassed, rich brat's mom and dad give him what he wants (just like they always have) and files suit. Rich kid's parents have enough money to bleed other kids parents dry, so they settle.
You might not like it, and you can make up all the stupid justifications for why you feel how you feel, but all you've done is support a rich spoiled brat abusing the courts to get something his parents never gave him and can't buy him. Self respect.
And even after it's over, he's the spoiled brat "Star Wars" kid, only now instead of being funny, he's that asshole who sued because he was embarrassed.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
"bullying the bully doesn't change it"
That is absolutly incorrect. It is well know to those of us that beat the crap out of a bully or two in our youth, that a baseball bat to the head will change things very quickly. If you avoid arrest, the bully very quickly learns that you are not a "fun" target anymore.
How right you are, but here's the funny part that I found: you don't even necessarily have to win the fight, you just have to be willing to fight it.
Putting up the resistance is usually all that's necessary. The mere threat of resistance is enough - bullies don't want to fight, they want to walk on you without effort. So, make 'em work for it, and you'll generally be left alone. I've see that to be true all throughout life, in all my personal and business relationships.
Be friendly! Work hard, help people, go to parties, be social, and be honorable in all your dealings! But whatever you do, make DAMNED SURE that at the first sign of any real threat, that they know that it would be painful to be your enemy.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Would that work for rape too?
Okay I've read this story for a few moments, and this is the FOURTH TIME THIS HAS BEEN COMPARED TO RAPE. Are you kidding? Do you really think some idiot video taping himself doing something embarrassing, on and using school property, and then leaving the video in a public place, is remotely comparable to rape or child abuse? Jesus. Get some bloody perspective.
As far as this kid being alienated "because" of the video -- I have a pretty good feeling that he already was alienated. (And that he already had some odd interpersonal traits. When most well-adjusted people would have laughed at themselves and tried to capitalize on the situation, this guy acted like he'd had a labotomy or something). The video just gave him a lightning rod to focus all of his anger.
Star Wars Kid Cuts a Deal With His Tormentors
You mean he sued Krispy Kreme for the way all those donuts endlessly tormented him?
I wouldn't normally make a cheap fat joke but something in the article got to me:
He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit.
Watch that video again sometime. Imagine how the ripplingly muscled greek adonis of that video must look now.
Oh, wait... He was a fat, dorky, clumsy idiot before the video ever got distributed. And distributing the video made him a fat, dorky, clumsy idiot?
I'm not saying it's cool that kids get bullied in highschool but one look at him tells you there's probably not a highschool on earth where he wouldn't have been the butt of endless jokes.
He was overweight, had a lousy haircut, was so mal-coordinated he couldn't stand upright when wiggling a broomstick, and was evidently an affirmed StarWars nerd. This is a kid who, whether bullying is acceptable or not, I think we can be pretty certain was bullied long before this video ever came out.
The one thing that changed was he got a degree of celebrity from this one which shifted it in to something OK to wallow in.
Most kids manage something utterly humiliating during their school lives. They wet themselves. They get dumped in public. They get their asses handed to them by a kid several years younger. Their yearbook picture catches them adjusting themselves. Their dad goes to jail. Whatever the case, they become the talk of the school for a couple of weeks. Their parents give them the tough but true advice, "Don't show that it bothers you and wait it out. In two or three weeks, someone else will have done something stupid."
In his case, the net gave him just enough celebrity to truly wallow. Instead of laughing and saying, "Yeah, it was pretty dorky, wasn't it." then leaving it two weeks to quieten down, he was pulled out of school. Instead of weathering it and waiting for it to die down, he gave interviews. Instead of being told, "Yeah, damn straight it sucks but it happens to everyone. You're just going to have to tough it out." this became "The Internet" and he was handed a great excuse to wallow. The really sad thing is, it's the wallowing that's likely done him the most harm.
Yeah, he'd have always got the odd joke about being the Star Wars kid but it would have died down. Instead, being allowed to wallow, he was able to completely sever all ties with normal teenage society. Instead of being allowed to cry at home every night for a week or two and then slowly face it, he was taken to a doctor and given meds, being told it was a reasonable response to be so upset. Instead of slowly accepting that, yeah, life does suck but you have to deal anyway, he was taught that his problems were someone else's fault and so he didn't have to take any responsibility in moving through them and coming out stronger on the far side.
I hate the bullying I faced as a kid. Some of it still hurts a huge amount. I'm also vastly more successful in life now because I had to come back from it and find a way through rather than was allowed to stay home, get home schooled, and wallow in how unfair everyone else was.
And so, when I hear how a fat kid who didn't exercise was so traumatized by his bullying that he "stopped pumping iron and really let [himself] go," I have to question how much of the problem was the same bullying that sucks utterly but toughens up most of us and how much was him getting a damned convenient excuse for many things that were already true.
How many guys out there "could have gone all the way" in their chosen sport before the got some terrible injury. And how many of them, if totally honest, never would have made it and the injury was a damned good excuse to stop trying and instead talk about what they could have been?
Is he any different other than that one video, that almost certainly wasn't the first time he was bullied, gave him a good excuse to stop trying in life and blame someone else for where he was, most likely, going to end up anyway?