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$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.
These are actually real laws?!?!?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Now I can send my naked pictures with no fear...
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.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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.
Because the guy went entirely too far. If he had posted anonymous copies of comments they had sent etc then it probably would have been tolerable as an 'experiment'. However, he posted photos, names, emails etc. - which is fairly brutal when shared on the net
On the over hand though, regardless of the false pretense, these people gave their data to him, and took a calculated risk as to whether the ad was genuine or not. It's not as if the data was stolen or anything. So it's a bit iffy, but overall, I'd say a good judgement
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.
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A reasonable expectation of privacy replying to a message in a public message board?
If I recall correctly, they responded to him in email.
My freshman soc prof told us how _not_ to do research if we wanted to get published. I think the book was called the Lavender Tea Room if I remember. Guy hung out at public restrooms, took down license plates, got their address and then went door-to-door surveying. "Hello, sir. Wife? Kids? Occupation?" Discovered that a surprising number of regular family guys will stop by the restroom for a quick blow on the way to work. Sociologically interesting but no way that book was going to get distributed even without releasing subject names.
Good.
This little turd is only starting starting to get what he deserves.
Personally, I am impressed that the individual wronged took him to court. If I had his name and address, I would have probably been a lot less gentle. People have been taking advantage of the anonymity of the internet to get away with completely unacceptable behavior for too long.
Human beings are social creatures and the defective ones need to be corrected or weeded out.
I can't say I sympathise with that bloke much. He posted an ad, and the people who responded to it did so under the assumption that it would be confidential. Not the smartest assumption, but a reasonable one nontheless.
Then, he posts the responses, including names. While this doesn't hurt him much, it can easily lead to great embarrassment and potential destruction of reputation for those men.
Regardless of what one thinks of the activities the guys thought they were responding to (sounded weird to me, but I'm a bit of a boring prude), the guy who posted people's identities is an asshat, and I can't say I feel much, or really any sympathy for him. He sounds like little more than an asshat.
On a related note, I hope the asses who post those "feel free to come and take all my stuff" ads on Craigslist, that result in people's houses being stripped down to nothingness, also get sued. Those who respond to them and steal the poor bastard's items, too.
Does this mean that people who get nasty cease-and-desist letters from lawyers are in the wrong for posting them publicly?
Not when someone posts them online you fool! Did you even rtfs!? FTS:
It is the act of posting the private responses online that is a violation of seclusion.
Just because I send you a personal e-mail containing highly private contents doesn't give you any right to post it on slashdot's front page, on your web site, or on some random forum of your choosing.
If you do so, and the content is highly offensive or highly private, you may give me a cause of action to sue your ass and collect a large amount of money from you, in compensatory damages, and in punitive damages.
34K on a default judgment? Default judgment means he lost because he never showed up. How did you spend this much against a guy who never showed up to defend himself?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
My main issue with that is viewing this as a private person to person conversation. These are emails that are sent to a completely anonymous email address that the sender has no idea what's going to happen to them.
Say I make a craigslist ad that says, "Hey, I'm looking for sex, call me at +4790369389, and you call that number, and it goes to A loudspeaker that broadcasts your voice to the public. You call that number and yell out that you're looking for sex, and here's your name and email. Am I now liable for broadcasting your public information to the world, or is that your own damn fault for not realizing what that number did.
So what if i make an email address that forwards your email verbatim to an email list? Is that the same, or do you expect more privacy from an anonymous email address than an anonymous phone number?
Look, I have no problem with expecting privacy on person to person conversations. However, I have a very hard time considering an email sent to a completely anonymous email address with which you have had no prior correspondence to be a private person to person conversation.
If there's anything more important than my ego around, i want it caught and shot now.
Naked pics of a slashdotter. Might just rip the internet straight from my wall and torch the local datacenter, just to be sure.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because:
1- Internet dating is not illegal
2- Being weird is not illegal
3- Vigilantism IS illegal because
4- Police are held to a higher standard than citizens in that
5- Due process must be used in court and
6- The police (typically) are not using sting ops for personal gain or aggrandizement and
7- many other reasons
8 goto 1
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
"Say I make a craigslist ad that says, "Hey, I'm looking for sex, call me at +4790369389, and you call that number, and it goes to A loudspeaker that broadcasts your voice to the public [oddstrument.com]. You call that number and yell out that you're looking for sex, and here's your name and email. Am I now liable for broadcasting your public information to the world,"
Yes, obviously.
"So what if i make an email address that forwards your email verbatim to an email list? Is that the same..."
Yes, obviously.
You set up an ad that claims a particular contact method is a way to initiate a private person-to-person contact. Someone foolishly trust you. Saying, "Sucker! You should have known I might be a lying douchebag" doesn't make you not a lying douchebag.