$74k Judgment Against Craigslist Prankster

jamie points out an update in the case of Jason Fortuny, the Craigslist prankster who was sued last year for publicly posting responses to a fake personal ad. The Citizen Media Law Project's summary of his case now includes a recently entered default judgment (PDF), fining Fortuny "... in the amount of $35,001.00 in statutory damages for Count I, violation of the Copyright Act; $5,000 in compensatory damages for Count II, Public Disclosure of Private Facts, and Count III, Intrusion Upon Seclusion." He has also been ordered to pay more than $34,000 in attorney and court fees.

Comments

Pay attention, kids

[localroger]

This is exactly what I thought would happen, a large civil judgement, as I predicted in the original linked /. thread. Repeat after me: I do not own the content of letters I receive.. Letters you are sent are exactly like books you buy; you can keep them forever and read them all you want and even loan them to your friends, but you cannot publish them. This is an entirely non-controversial no-brainer in legal circles, no matter how silly you think it is, and it's why the guy got slammed. The extra helping of privacy violation is just icing on the copyright cake, and of course he gets the bill for feeding the lawyers too.

No show == guilty?

[burnin1965]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was a Default Judgement, which means the plaintiff did not show. That is why he lost, not because there was a thorough review of the matter at hand.

Somehow I doubt this will be valid as a precedent in future lawsuits.

Re:Reasonable expectation of privacy

[whiledo]

Again, though, a classified ads site is not the same thing as a web forum. If you replied in email to a person who posted an ad on the site, what would you expect to happen? Would you expect the person to post it publicly? No. That's what expectations are all about. It doesn't matter that he CAN post them publicly. If you follow your logic then there is no such thing as privacy. I could be having a "private" conversation with you, but be secretly recording it and then post it on the internet.

That's what we're talking about here, whether you can reasonably expect certain communications to be private or not. Personally, I would rather have the law say that there is such a thing as privacy than in your alternate universe where nothing is private.