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Blogger Successfully Quashes Subpoena
Ares writes "In a follow-up to Blogger Subpoenaed for Criticizing Trial Lawyers, Katherine Seidel's blog indicates that not only has she successfully quashed her subpoena, but the lawyer issuing said subpoena is now under orders to appear and explain why the courts shouldn't sanction him for it. This should be interesting, because in addition to Ms. Seidel's subpoena in New Hampshire, the lawyer issued a similar subpoena to a doctor and a Harvard professor under similar circumstances."
Good to hear she can return to addressing more important things in life... like autism...
Well, how about that... If only this sort of story were not the exception rather than the rule.
I have a friend who recently started a small business (he makes board games). On release of his first game, he was immediately sent a letter from a competitor's lawyer demanding either cease-and-desist, or a licensing agreement for the use of the term "Superheroes*". Are you kidding me?! My understanding is that this company routinely threatens any small business (they're fairly small too) that creates a game with "Superheroes" in the name, and threatens legal action or a licensing payment.
Most of these companies run on a shoestring budget and caved, but my friend hired a lawyer to write an aggressive response, threatening countersuits, etc. My understanding is that he never heard from them again. In an ideal world, this sort of through-the-legal-system extortion and bullying would be severely reprimanded, but in the real world, a small business is generally considered lucky if they only have to shell out a few hundred (or thousand) in lawyer fees.
* It wasn't really that, but a similarly generic term. I don't want to stir anything up for my friend. Lawyers may be listening!
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Injustices benefit a few, justice benefits us all. By the numbers, you're more likely to benefit from justice than injustice.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
similarly, the fact that we like to root for the underdog...
perhaps this is related to our empathic natures. We are capable of placing ourselves into these stories, of seeing that if it could happen to them, it could happen to us. By seeing justice served, it means that one less person can act against our own best interests. In effect, when the big bully gets knocked down a peg, we are safer - even if it wasn't us getting picked on in the first place.
...is how much in the way of legal bills did Seidel run up getting the supoena quashed. If it was a lot, we should be outraged. And if we're outraged, we should express our outrage in a constructive manner: go to her web site, click on "donate" and drop a few bucks in her kitty.
And don't say "She can get damages from that shyster for his misuse of the legal system". That's a lot harder to do than people seem to realize.
Oh crap. That's wrong. Genes can code for behavior that's bad for the individual, but good for the survival of that particular gene.
Hehe, that is SO true. Who DIDN'T root for the coyote to catch the roadrunner? Life isn't fair, yet most of us are born with an innate desire for it to be so. This desire for fairness has been shown to be more powerful than the profit motive. Yet our economic system is based on the premise that individual profit is most rewarding to individuals. It is set up to reward selfishness, and in essence makes life less fair. When it seems there is no possibility that life can be fair, most people resort to selfish behavior. So our economic system becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yes, but your benefit from injustice is likely to be much greater.
A company distributing a significant amount of its profits to all its employees might double all their salaries and be fair, but the top few management people could no longer draw $10m salaries for screwing the company up....