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City Sues To Prevent Linking To Its Website

Posted by kdawson on from the nolo-mi-tangere dept.

Mike writes "In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case, the Sheboygan city attorney ordered Jennifer Reisinger to remove a link to the city's police department from her Web site. The city went further, she claims, launching a criminal investigation of her for linking to the department on one of her sites, and in response she's suing the mayor and the city. 'The mayor decided to use his office to get back at Jennifer for her efforts in the recall and picked this to do it,' said her attorney, Paul Bucher. It appears this will go to court, and the question will be can a city (or any business or Web property) stop people from posting a link to its site?"

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  1. The bigger question... changing the legal system by compumike · · Score: 0, Troll

    So, yes, this is silly, but ultimately this is just one example of a bigger phenomenon: people filing stupid lawsuits, where simply the burden of defending oneself is overwhelming / not worth it. This happens for many reasons: lawyers are expensive, court simply takes time, etc.

    Is there some way we can modify the legal system so that these kinds of frivolous suits die quickly and cheaply? Like an online peer review thing, where there's an anonymous, rotating committee of reviewers who can triage filings and vote to reject them? This has its own problems too, of course -- the rule of the mob emerges.

    So I'm not sure what the solution is, but it seems like we have to think about how to make it about two orders of magnitude cheaper/easier to defend oneself in court against frivolous suits.

    --
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