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Texas Judge Orders Identification of Topix Trolls
eldavojohn writes "Ars Technica has a story on a Texas judge who has ordered Topix.com to hand over the identifying details of 178 trolls that allegedly made 'perverted, sick, vile, inhumane accusations' about Mark & Rhonda Lesher. Mark Lesher was accused of sexually assaulting an unidentified former client (and subsequently found not guilty) which prompted the not so understanding discussions on Topix. Topix has until March 6 to give up the information. Let's hope the Leshers don't visit Slashdot!"
Odds are good that the company will turn over the records, and nothing will come of it after that. Can you imagine them going after 170 people at once? I can't, unless they are the RIAA.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=define%3A+cad
Although, from what little I know of the situation, I disagree with the assertion that the judge is a cad. At face value it looks like he is doing the correct thing. He was presented with specific posts that are legally actionable and he is continuing the action on those posts.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I complained to my daughter's principle that my daughter's teacher was a racist and wasn't doing her job -- and promptly received a "Cease and Desist" order from the teacher's lawyer accusing my of "Interfering with [the teacher's] business relationships" and "defamation"! Let's face it -- ANY comment made online could be considered actionable! I'm sorry, but I still believe my right to free speech extends to offensive speech, and that readers should be intelligent enough to recognize hyperbole when they see it -- especially in an anonymous post! Or do you think every time some punk in WoW calls me a "faggot", I should be able to turn around and sue him?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
... the users posting these comments gave fake information when creating an e-mail address to register at Topix and posted from an anonymous location such as an internet cafe?
God forbid this judge actually visit part of the internet... I shudder to think what would happen if he saw 4chan... although it would be pretty funny. "Judge orders anonymous to turn itself in."
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
Personally I don't even remember if I had heard that this couple had been accused of anything. Now I will forever remember them as the couple who gave a flying fucking rats ass what was said about them on the second most pointless forum on the Internet, Topix.
I never heard of them either (and will, no doubt, forget their names quickly enough). I also don't give a rat's ass what was said about them anywhere.
But they obviously care if vitriolic untruths were spread about them in a public forum. Perhaps the next time one of them applies for a job, or tries to rent an apartment (for instance), that vitriol will come up in the google search. It is significant for them now and in the future.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Sigh.
The ability to sue for libel, slander and general defamation does not infringe the right to free speech, because it does not restrict speech. It just does what most civil law is intended to do: hold people accountable for harm they cause.
To see an example, suppose you're a programmer looking for a job, and a company is about to hire you. But then someone at the company reads a post I've written about you on the Internet where I make (false) claims that you don't know anything about programming, that you were incompetent and cost my company lots of money, etc., and as a result they decide not to hire you. My post has caused actual harm to you (loss of a job opportunity), and you could bring a lawsuit against me to recover damages. Not a lawsuit forbidding me to write things, or forbidding me to say what's on my mind, but simply to compensate you for the harm my words caused. This is really no different from, say, being forced to pay to replace a window if I throw a rock through it.
And that distinction -- between regulating the act of speech, and holding people accountable for the consequences of the action -- is what makes all the Constitutional difference (a law forbidding you to speak would be unconstitutional -- the term is "prior restraint"). In other words, it's the difference between saying, before the fact, "you aren't allowed to do that" and saying, after the fact, "you must make amends for what you did". The former, when speech is involved, is called prior restraint and there are very few cases in which it's allowed. The latter is simply called a civil suit, and is as common as weeds.
... the users posting these comments gave their neighbor's information when creating an e-mail address to register at Topix and posted from their neighbor's insecure wifi?
Prior to this I'd never heard of Topix before... and after reading everything on here I'm going to pretend I still haven't heard of it.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
There's no law against being an ass hole, and there never should be. Period. As Rowan Atkinson once said - the right to offend is far more important than the right to be offended. Anyone who takes what they read online so seriously that they become offended don't deserve to have a modem. Anyone who tries to start legal action based on said offense deserves to be shot. Who cares what a bunch of trolls said on some site or other. Turn the machine off and walk away.
It's not the same if some idiot on a website makes a derogatory comment (true or not), or if a newspaper or magazine (where people expect a degree of research and professionalism) says it. Libel suits should not be allowed against any random idiot because it undermines free speech. The justice system is broken as it is and would never be able to cope with every transgression spoken against someone else. So unless we want to bring back duelling, this should be laughed at and we should move on.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
At one point in time, Texas was primarily filled with Texans. After the oil boom in the 80s and the rise of the Sun Belt, tons upon tons upon tons of people relocated to Texas. They didn't care a fig for how Texans did things in the past, and immediately began changing things to suit themselves. Prior to this, Texas and the United States sort of held each other at arm's length, which suited both parties.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Texas likes to protect its citizens from the tyranny of federal government so that the tyranny of state government has someone left to act on.
It is important to note that a decision that appears bad or stupid may well result from a perfectly smart and competent judge correctly interpreting a bad or stupid law.
When a judge says the law says something you don't like, don't blame the judge unless you really think the law says something different than they do. Cases where there is good reason to disagree about what the law says are not nearly so common as cases where the law clearly and unarguably says something dumb.
I want to see if the secret B.O.R. gives you the right to not be made to feel bad by someones free speech.
You misunderstand both the Bill of Rights and Free Speech.
First: The Bill of Rights is a set of limits on government and its officials, not on other people. (And it solely recognizes preexisting rights and warns the government to not to try to take them away, rather than creating them.)
Second: The right to free speech that the Bill of Rights recognizes is a right to not be blocked in advance, not a right to be immune from a claim for restitution for any damages or losses to others that your speech caused.
Just as the right to bear arms isn't a right to shoot innocent parties without expectation of punishment and the right to free exercise of religion isn't a right to perform human sacrifice of unwilling victims, the right to free speech isn't a right to destroy someone else's valuable reputation with lies without having to pay him for the damage you caused.
(It IS a right to destroy his valuable but UNEARNED reputation with TRUTH. In the United States truth is an absolute defense against claims of defamation. But you'd better be prepared to back up your claims - in a civil court, where the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt".)
(And the obligatory IANAL.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
God forbid this judge actually visit part of the internet
Excessively bad behavior by a large (or active) enough minority will destroy a free and civil society by causing "everyone else" to defend themselves by enacting more and more laws to try and tamp down such disruptive behavior.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What's Topix? Some kind of forum I gather. Does it have a moderation system? Wait. Don't answer that. I don't care.
The difference is that the spoken word (unless recorded) is gone once it leaves your mouth, but something on paper (or the internet) sticks around.
> The right to state your views anonymously does not extend to being a shield against liability if your statements are found to be actionable.
Legally? Morally?
Technically, using TOR (or something similar) solves these tricky problems. You get to say what you want, about what you want. That's freedom of speech, not being careful not to type something which another person might consider `sick`.
The broader term is defamation.
When it was originally developed the distinction between the form probably made more sense. Because there was no other, more practical way to mechanically record and reproduce the spoken word, libelous material was naturally easier to distribute than slander.
Several hundred years later, not so much.
You are absolutely free to voice or write an opinion. You are even absolutely free to voice or write an absolute falsehood. But, if you write a falsehood that harms another person, you are responsible for that harm; that is what slander/libel laws are about.
Imagine that there was an amendment that says "Americans have the right to throw bricks". If you throw a brick through some one's window, you'll still have to pay for it. If you throw a brick at some one's head and kill them, you will be charged with manslaughter.
Just because you can throw bricks, doesn't mean you can cause harm to others and escape punishment. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean you can say anything you want and avoid the consequences.
You seem to be hung up on a misunderstanding: rape is a crime, and is handled by a criminal process whereby a government official prosecutes you and, if convicted, you receive a sentence from the government as punishment. Defamation (which includes libel, slander, etc.), on the other hand (in this type of case, and in the US), is not a crime. The government does not prosecute people for it, and does not punish people for it. It's a tort, and is handled by a civil process; effectively, the government-run court acts as a sort of mediator/enforcer in a disagreement between individuals or corporations. A tort (the word comes to us from the French for "wrong") is something you shouldn't have done (whether deliberately or accidentally) and which caused some actual harm to a person or actual damage to someone's property (although, importantly, not a breach of contract -- that's handled by a separate area of law), and the result of a successful lawsuit over a tort is payment of damages or some other form of restitution.
Which brings me back once again to the key difference: defamation laws do not restrict or prevent or outlaw any type of speech. They simply provide people with a way to be compensated for harm done to them.
In the case of defamation, generally it is asserted that a person's reputation has been harmed by a particular statement, and the standard of proof for the harm varies with the type of statement. Some statements -- for example, false assertions that someone has committed a serious crime -- are (in most US states) automatically considered harmful enough to be defamation, but other statements require a description of the alleged harm and proof that the harm actually occurred as a result of the statement. Also, (again, in the US) a defamation suit must generally prove that the statements either were made with intent to cause harm, or were made with negligent disregard for their truth (this provision and several others in US defamation law, by the way, exist precisely because of the First Amendment, in order to prevent defamation suits from having an improperly chilling effect on the genuine expression of opinion).
So this isn't really a candidate for a slippery slope argument; the body of law around defamation is literally thousands of years old, and has been refined and clarified over that time to ensure that it's fair and equitable to both sides, with a history of court rulings balancing the need to redress harm against the need to protect free speech. Unfortunately, it's just not something the average person ever really learns about...