Slashdot Mirror
Craigslist Prankster Sued, Argues DMCA Abuse
destinyland writes "Though Sunday's New York Times dubbed him a spokesperson for internet trolls, Jason Fortuny's just been sued in federal court. Fortuny re-published over 180 responses to a fake sex ad on Craigslist in 2006 — but he's finally been located and issued with a summons. The victim argues Fortuny violated his privacy, and that the photo Fortuny re-published was copyrighted. Fortuny argues he re-published the photo to stand up to the victim's bogus DMCA notice, and that the gullible victim had voluntarily provided the photo. In a motion to the court Fortuny even argues that he helped publicize a privacy risk on the internet, whereas 'bringing legal action against me may punish me, but it won't change or even impact online culture.'"
'bringing legal action against me may punish me, but it won't change or even impact online culture.'
I guess the punishment is what his victims want.
OMG getting sued is such epic lulz for a troll, right?
Classic forum troll behavior when they get in trouble they are surprised and inset that they were actually helping. He does point out an uncomfortable truth though, there will always be forum trolls to annoy and confound the masses with their stupidity and ill-logic.
But if you punish enough criminals, you DO change and impact the culture.
This man is damaged piece of crap. I feel sorry for him, having been abused as a child, but that does not excuse him taking out his crap on the rest of us.
He is a semi-professional 'troll', going around pissing people off and laughing at them.
He routinely engages in low-level criminal actions, knowing that he is unlikely to get caught and arrested for doing things that are the equivelent of spray painting a car.
I hope he finally gets what he so richly deserves, legal punishment.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I think at least one marriage was broken up because of this ordeal. It struck me a seriously a-hole move of his, and not very funny.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
Right, because the respondent didn't already have problems with his marriage.
The article does not explicitly say anything about his lawyer, and it sounds like he is doing this on his own. Whether he is right or wrong it will probably not matter unless he can find himself a decent lawyer. Going into legal proceedings without a lawyer is a train wreck in progress.
The only thing worse than trying to find sex on the internet is to get legal advice on the internet. Either way you are going to receive it the same way.
Anyone thinking of complaining that the summary is worthless without pics, near the bottom of TFA there is a link to the full list of responses and photos at Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Be warned, it's NSFW ... in fact IMO it's not even safe if you're simply trying to maintain an appetite in anticipation of lunchtime
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Wow. "I swear it's not my fault honey, blame the hooker". The husband (I assume) responded to a SEX ad on Craigslist and it's the fault of the prankster.
If I were that guys wife I'd send a thank you to Fortuny for helping me cut my losses.
Sounds like the Comedian who went to a telemarketers conference and started calling all the hotel rooms at 3 am and published the results.
you will note that fortuny has a history of sexual abuse as a child, that his family turned a blind eye towards. which goes far, pop psychology wise, to explaining what would motivate him to do his craigs list "expose": an attempt to find empowerment over an issue which means helplessness to him psychologically
so, in a way, his trolling is just therapy, catharsis. which is my whole theory of trolling: far from pointless negative and twisted, online trolling is merely a way to jettison asocial impulses harmlessly (relatively harmlessly) on the internet
having said that, and fully appreciative of the fact that free speech fundamentalists will come out in support of fortuny, i say to you free speech fundamentalists: no law or government can protect you from the consequences of what you say. in other words, there are elements of speech which have every expectation of protection. then there are elements of free speech, that, while a good argument can be made for their official, societal level acceptance, doesn't mean some asshole somewhere isn't going to get upset and try to do something about what you say
insulting pictures of mohammed, for example. yes, a sound understanding of free speech means that insulting pictures of mohammed should be tolerated. however, a legal, societal understanding of tolerance on this issue does not protect you from the anger of religious fundamentalists who could care less about tolerance
you don't have protection from the consequences of what you say, regardless of the legal environment. making enemies of random guys looking for easy sex is not a situation where a idealistic expectation of free speech without consequences gets you very far
remember that about free speech: it has consequences. if you get upset about that idea, or expect government to somehow protect you from the consequences of what you say, you really don't understand the whole notion that with freedom comes responsibility, which is the only notion that will keep speech truly free
like any right in this world, it carries with it responsibility. shoot your mouth of without any regard for conesequences, and you will discover that consequences happen, that not everyone in society is a tolerant ethical individual
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm not vouching for infidelity and don't tell me this prankster was out to do any good. He was doing it to humiliate these people. Still, in the end it clearly does illustrate that you have to be careful what you send over the tubes.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
It COULD be comedy gold if you stripped the real identities from the responses before you make fun of them (even then it's a little prickish, considering you BAITED them). If you reveal the real identities of these duped people, it's not comedy. It's just being a mean-spirited, malicious asshole.
A kid who busts his ass stupidly trying to jump off a roof in a stunt--funny. Throwing a kid off a roof for fun--felony.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
if you look for sex on the internet you are getting into legal trouble, and if you look for legal advice on the internet you are going to get fucked
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Really? I've bought and sold legit stuff on Craigslist. A lot easier than dealing with ebay.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Perhaps she'd have preferred if the rest of the world didn't find out at the same time.
Perhaps he'd never have gone through with the meeting?
Perhaps someone else thought it'd be fun to reply to an ad on craigslist in their friend's name and enclose a photo of their friend? That sounds like a pretty likely scenario amongst friends who play jokes on one another. Imagine if one of your friends did that and before you even found it, your 'reply' to a sex ad was posted on an internet site and gathering thousands of hits.
Your argument is not valid. This is not vigilante justice because cheating on your wife is not against the law, and her finding out about this and leaving you is also not against the law. So, you have a consequence that is legal that follows a behavior that is legal. That is not part of the definition of vigilante justice, no more than your boss is a "vigilante" if you get fired for telling him to fuck off.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yeah its "hilarious." Its a severe breach of privacy. If you like that joke, then I'm going to start a fake suicide hotline and replay the tapes on the web. I'll even insert my own amusing commentary. I'm not a troll, I'm "helping." Hey, if those people didnt want to be made fun of then they should not have been suicidal to begin with!
I hope this guy gets taken to the cleaners for what he did.
Seriously, people. This guy put out a honeypot . And those of low moral character took the bait. And he alleges that he learned from this (expecting no responses, getting nearly 200). IT Security folks do this all the time. He just took the technical security solution, and made it a social security solution. (Nevermind that the term "honeypot" actually originates closer to Fortuny's actions than the IT solution.)
And, I bet that those wives who filed for divorce over this are thanking Fortuny for exposing their (now or soon-to-be) ex-husbands for the cheaters that they are. The married men who responded obviously weren't thinking too much of their vows.
That said, I do think they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, which was broken. Fortuny could have got his point across just fine by smudging the photos before posting them.
Yeah, because trying to find a renter for your spare room or sublet apartment is illegal and immoral. The scam works because they pretend to be a student enrolled in university and ask you to forward the balance of the rubber cheque their "parents" wrote to some third party to pay for books or furniture or some other sort of fee.
That aside, the guy in question here is a victim of fraud. He responded to someone who put forth that they were a woman looking for a man, except the whole thing was fraudulent, like a sting operation being conducted by someone who has no authority to do so.
It doesn't matter that he was revealed to be looking for sex. What matters is that he was suckered into having his dirty laundry aired in public while those who would pass judgment on him have their skeletons comfortably locked away in the closet.
As for the malicious asshole who likes to pretend he's a woman and shame people for recreation, well, he belongs in a shallow grave. He's malicious, and a coward, and a liar, and he screws peoples lives up for sport. I'd quite happily shoot him in the head with my own hand and go back to eating my lunch.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The comedian was Tom Mabe, the album was A Wake Up Call for Telemarketers
Only place with samples I've found were on Rhapsody. Scroll down to the "Hotel Calls". They're not as funny as some of his other stuff where he just outright leads a telemarketer on, but they're funny in the sense of, you can tell the guys are tired as hell and they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
Here's a press release from before the album was made: http://www.reversespins.com/telemarketing.html
Yeah, personally, I've tried to live my life by a basic rule: If I would be too ashamed to handle everyone in the world knowing what I'm doing, then don't do it. It kinda mostly works most of the time, and has kept me out of a lot of possible trouble. The main problem is that people sometimes don't think I'm too much fun.
Now, that's not to say that I don't do anything that would shame myself. It's just that it's a level of shame that I can handle. Like let's say I were interested in BDSM, I would look at it as having two choices on what to do about that. Either I don't engage in it because I wouldn't want to carry around that level of shame, -or- I would have to learn to embrace that it was part of who I was sufficiently that, if for some reason I had to explain it to my mother, I could handle it. That's not to say I would try to get so comfortable about it that I would seek out a conversation with my mother, but I would try to figure out what those impulses were in me, and exercise them in ways that I wouldn't have to feel overly ashamed of.
The basic way that I see it is that shame is instructive. Shame is your psyche's way of telling you that you think there's something wrong with your behavior. So if you're ashamed, you should engage your psyche in a sort of discussion, and try to discover whether there really is something wrong with your behavior. If there is something wrong, then strongly consider *not doing it*. If there isn't something wrong, then try not to be so ashamed. It's not really quite that simple, but it's a lot simpler than most people seem to think.
So yeah, overall, I agree with you (I think). If your life will be ruined by trolling for BDSM sex with strangers on Craigslist, then maybe you should consider not doing that.
I'm not vouching for infidelity and don't tell me this prankster was out to do any good. He was doing it to humiliate these people.
Can't we do both at the same time?
Honestly, I don't buy that his actions were guided merely by a desire to "do good". On the other hand, it doesn't seem impossible that he imagined this project might have some beneficial effects. It's informative about the lack of privacy/anonymity of online communications. It's discouraging people from engaging in this sort of behavior. It's exposing some creepy individuals for what they are. It's showing some interesting facets of human behavior.
Yes, it's also humiliating some people. I'm not sure that this in and of itself is an awful thing. Sometimes people should be humiliated when they do something bad or stupid. It sets an example of why you don't do bad and stupid things. The main problem that I see is that it has the potential to be such a far-reaching and long-term humiliation. When something is put on the internet, anyone in the world can see it, and it can stick around forever. Essentially, these guys can never walk into a room for the rest of their lives and be able to trust that the people in that room haven't seen these emails and pictures. That's pretty rough.
Actually, no, that's (as in many other cases) just a thin veil for another time-honoured troll technique: adding (more) insult to injury by blaming their victim.
E.g., the "it's your fault if you can be insulted in the first place" idea was even featured in a recent NYT article, linked to on /. too. See, suddenly it's not him who's being a troll by calling the journalist incompetent, it's the journalist's fault and revealing that he got "defensive" by asking, "why? what did I do?" In reality, the trolls themselves are very quick to get insulted too. The pointing out that "shortcoming" is really just a way to heap extra insult on the victim.
E.g., in this case, it seems to me like the same applies. The whole "raising awareness" is just a thinly veiled way of saying "it's you who's gullible." It just adds that extra jab.
I mean, if you think about it, it doesn't even try to look at all helpful or believable in that role. The excuse boils down to, basically, "I'm an arsehole and doing X just to show that arseholes exist and can do X." Where X was actually pretty obvious to everyone in the first place.
If he thinks that that kind of behaviour is actually helpful, then I offer to raise his awareness to the fact that he can have his head bashed in with a brick in a sock, by demonstrating it on you. Hey, I'm just being equally helpful. It's just teaching him to watch his back ;)
If it's not an extra jab at the victim, then I'm seriously curious what kind of a deranged mind would think that that's being helpful.
It's not even some online phenomenon. People do things on trust every day IRL too. E.g.,
- if you ever had a photo of your girlfriedn naked, or conversely she had one of you, then one of you trusted that the other won't use it in some humiliating way
- you leave your home unguarded, on the implicit assumption that the neighbours won't then bash your door in and steal all you have
- you pay with a credit card at a restaurant, basically trusting the waiter to not copy the data and make other purchases with your money
- you hop in a taxi and, essentially, trust the guy or gal that he won't kill you and dump your corpse at the first oportunity to do it unseen (more than one girl guessed wrong there, and got raped before being killed too.)
- you give a 50 euro bill to a taxi driver for a 11 Euro trip, and trust him that he'll give you 39 Euro back. He _could_ just say, "what? you gave me nothing" and even call the cops, and it's your word against his.
- when you open your front door for the mailman or some utilities guys, you trust them to not mug you and rob you instead. (Again, some people guessed wrong there.)
Etc.
We _are_ "gullible" like that, because nobody can live in a bunker and guard their back 100% of the time. So we have some laws against those kind of things, _and_ we essentially trust people at least to not be the stupid kind of predators. You know, the kind which gains disproportionately little compared to the harm and penalties, or even makes a personal loss in the process too.
You trust, for example the taxi driver to not shaft you out of 50 Euros, because, frankly it's not worth it. He can only do that a couple of times, before he makes a much bigger loss than that.
And some people trusted a perfect stranger with their photos, because it wasn't obvious what he'd have to gain by using them.
And he's raising awareness to what? That he's a prime example of an arsehole who does it just for damage sake? I don't need anyone was that blissfully ignorant to that possibility.
So, again, it seems to me that the whole thing was just one last jab at the victims.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
People like this are completely useless, and all his high-and-mighty rhetoric about "messages" and "trust" reads like the inane drivel a ninth-grader would scrawl in his Mead notebook after getting shoved by the bullies in gym class. Dressing your bullshit up in high-school "philosophy" doesn't make you any less of an asshole, but it sure does make you look more stupid.
In the end, nothing he does, including his Craigslist stunt, is about "messages" or "public service". If that's all his goal was -- to show that there's a lot of people out there into this sort of thing and willing to cheat on their spouses -- he could've erased or blurred the names and other personal information of the people who responded. But he left it all intact, showing that his goal was really to "lulz" and humiliate people to whom he feels superior.
It's all about how he feels superior to the target and wants to get attention. Well, he got attention. Good work.
Also, did anyone read his hand-wringing, whiny letter to the judge in this case? His tearful sobbing about how he doesn't have the money is quite hilarious, but there's also this gem:
Great argument there, champ. Even if you buy it, which I don't, at best it shows that he's an unhinged idiot willing to do anything he wants and is incapable of considering the consequences, which is hardly an argument in his favor.
Or this:
Yeah, Jason, you're a real hero to the "community".
What a pissant.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
If you look through the court documents, the plaintiffs had quite some difficulty serving Jason Fortuny. They finally had to resort to emailing him, which isn't normally proper service. However, Fortuny took the emailed complaint and posted a story about being sued. That showed that he knew about the complaint, which gave the plaintiff ammunition in requesting that the court accept the emails as adequate service of process.
Fortuny's subsequent letter was not well received by the court:
Jason Fortuny is well on his way to losing this case through a default judgment. At they very least, he could have gotten a half-hour of legal advice for only $35 if he had tried looking for a lawyer. A half-hour of advice would have been enough to help him avoid making some serious mistakes from the get-go.
"To Catch A Predator" is also rather stupid, but the difference is that in one, the person intends to meet someone for an illegal purpose (sex with a minor) and in the other, the person intends to meet someone for a completely legal purpose (sex with a consenting adult).
The other, less important difference is in the attitude. Most people would argue that "To Catch A Predator" accomplishes something at least partially useful, and for better or worse, what "most people" think is usually what's important in law. But this guy pulls his stunts for the sole purpose of being a jackass and humiliating people so he can have "lulz" with his fellow blogtards. It's only after he gets in trouble that he begins his furtive explanations and backpeddling about how it was all really for the common good, an argument I don't think anyone takes seriously.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
It's not entrapment when someone else does it because the definition of entrapment includes "government officials" in it. As Fortuny isn't a government official, we fail the first test.
Further, committing adultery, while legal grounds for divorce (in many jurisdictions that still require any reasons whatsoever), is not a crime, thus we fail the second test.
Even if Fortuny were a government agent pursuing people for committing an actual crime of adultery (yeah, right, politicians banning adultery? They'd lose their favourite pasttime, right after spending our money!), would this be an illegal entrapment? From "The 'Lectric Law Library's Lexicon", I see a definition that requires three things:
First, the idea for committing the crime came from the government agents and not from the person accused of the crime. These men were perusing a personals section of an on-line classifieds site. They were already thinking of finding new girlfriends/sexual partners while married. Fail. Second, the government agents then persuaded or talked the person into committing the crime. Simply giving him the opportunity to commit the crime is not the same as persuading him to commit the crime. This one appears to be more subjective. However, based on the fact that there was but a single ad, and not continuous taunting or pressure from Fortuny, I'd say this is a fail, too. And third, the person was not ready and willing to commit the crime before the government agents spoke with him. See the first point. They were perusing a section of Craig's List which was for this purpose. They were ready and willing to commit the "crime" already.So, no, this is not entrapment. There isn't a single similarity with entrapment here. This is merely allowing people to make fools of themselves and then following up by actually showing the fools for what they are. Going up to an undercover cop and buying a dime of heroin isn't entrapment. Nor is an undercover cop buying from a street dealer. This isn't even close.
By the way, do you know what the state of his marriage was? Do you know anything about him at all? But you will happily say that the victim's pain is justified. Come out of your religious conservative rat hole, open your eyes, mind and heart and breathe some fresh air.
Wish I had mod points today. Posting anonymously not because of fear of -1 moderation but because of privacy concerns.
The fact of the matter is that someone was advertising something that others would consider "taboo", and other people contributed themselves; in order to elicit a response, and specifically to humiliate these people, he pretended he was one of them.
I think that's a dangerous slope, honestly. Irregardless of what you think of the people in question, the fact is that there was a level of trust there that was blatantly abused by your friend. To me, this is like that show To Catch A Predator; while some can argue that the people that are getting caught in those stings get what they deserve, I think it's a dangerous slope to resort to such vigilante justice by people ill equipped for the task.
You judge these people as perverts, among other adjectives. The fact of the matter is that these people were looking for mutual, consensual sex. Key words are mutual and consensual. Who is Jason to judge these people? Who are you? Nothing they wanted is in any way, shape or form abusive or harming anyone.
I do not share their views; I find the acts reprehensible. But I am not about to resort to vigilante justice to humiliate others. Even if there's no "crime", Jason deserves some comeuppance for how he's affected their lives, especially in a world where anything about you online - whether voluntarily put there or not - is grounds to affect your job, and other things that affect items in "real" life that have nothing to do whatsoever with that subject.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".