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Craigslist Fights Back, Sues SC Atty General
FredMastro writes "Craigslist has now stepped past just asking for an apology. The Wall Street Journal and CNet report that Craigslist is fighting back. 'Craigslist said it has sued South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, in the latest escalation of a battle over adult-oriented ads on the company's site. Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's chief executive, said in a blog post that the company filed its suit in federal court in South Carolina. ...'" Unfortunately, the WSJ's piece requires a subscription, but reader Locke2005 adds a link to coverage in the San Jose Business Journal.
People trying to make Craigslist into this big bad fraud sex site is getting old. It's about 2% of US internet traffic, no duh it's got a few hookers on it.
It's about time someone stood up for free speech. Intimidation and coercion need to be met with even more force to keep our rights intact.
that and I like Craigslist.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
1) Copy and paste the url http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124283370260739663.html
2) Copy and paste into google, resulting in a link like this
Click link and read page.
Not pasting full text of article though, so you're gonna have to do it yourself.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Disclaimer: This is total speculation. I have no facts to back this up:
I'm wondering if there are some power printing/publishing interests lobbying the state government to hamstring Craiglists because of the thread that site represents to print advertising.
Consider this section of TFA:
Emphasis mine.
If it weren't for the thread that craigslist represents to print media advertising, I would have concluded that this was just another puritan witch hunt. However, the fact that craigslist has fewer adult services ads than mainstream publishers in the state leads me to speculate that this is about smacking down "unfair competition" from an outsider.
This space left intentionally blank.
That's a horrible idea.
And what happens when all the frivolous lawsuits that people love tossing around get used like a DoS attack against unpopular people, or people that someone has a vendetta against?
What happens when 10,000 anti-war activists all file individual suits against the president? He's supposed to put out of pocket to defend himself?
And if I'm the CEO of Apple, and someone doesn't like their iPhone and can't get a refund because they're past the purchase date allowance, if they sue me because they feel wronged, do I pay for it myself?
Unreasonable plan.
So this is an argument between Mr. Buckmaster and Mr. McMaster?
So this is all just a bunch of Master-debating?
-Peter
I find it ironic that the SC AG's office promises to monitor Craigs. I can just see it now:
"Jimmy, you need to go troll an adult oriented web site all afternoon to see if they have taken down the dirty pictures yet."
"Yes sir!"
He improperly used his office to personally threaten Craigslist into doing what he wanted. He also publicly and improperly stated that the operators of Craigslist were criminally responsible for prostitution, essentially calling them pimps in the national media. I'm not saying they're going to win, but I believe that those two issues are the basis for their case.
A bit off-topic: I applaud Craigslist, but I noticed this article is arguably more about McMaster than it is about Craigslist.
The bias is not hostile or obvious, as one might expect from stereotyped hostile reporting source, which is not to say that the SJ Business Journal is such. Mostly it is an imbalance in coverage styles and content.
Most paragraphs describe what McMaster did, what he thinks, what he has to say, etc. He is often quoted with his reactions to the suit. His position is explained in detail.
Craigslist, on the other hand, gets comparatively little verbiage in its own words. Craigslist's reaction to McMaster's assertions are stated in broad terms, without McMaster's sense of specificity and precision.
The reader is left with a good idea of McMaster's position and less of Craigslist's. This is a great article for students of propaganda studies to cite when looking for media bias in the news, either deliberate or incidental.
Just a note.
Are you implying that your opposition to illegal activity is stronger than your commitment to free speech? That's the sentiment evil men use to create nightmare police states.
In a statement, Mr. McMaster called Craigslist's legal action "good news" because "it shows that Craigslist is taking the matter seriously for the first time."
The logical disconnect is astounding, like if McBride claimed to be glad that Novell was suing because is demonstrates their serious intent.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I admit there is a fine line between condoning such activity and trying to make it safer for the parties involved. You could say the same for groups that give out clean needles and groups that feed illegal aliens. Certainly these are activities that shouldn't be going on in the first place, but by keeping them out of sight you make them many times more dangerous.
Blog
I don't know how the adult/erotic services was ever allowed. I figure they are facilitating a crime, and illegal industry, whether explicitly knowing or not.Where ads are free, if they don't have an explicit categories for whores to advertise, then the whores will spam all the other categories! Finding ads for sex services in the dating section is considerably more annoying then finding them in section where you have to be explicitly looking for whores to be viewing the first place. Sorta like being propositioned in church, it is somewhat disturbing! Giving the sex services their own place actually minimizes the impact on craigslist customers, and minimizes minors accidentally stumbling upon the material.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Read this...
http://blog.craigslist.org/2009/05/an-apology-is-in-order/
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Just drive down I-85 or I-95 and see how many nudie bars are advertising on billboards all the way down the corridor.
The hypocracy of this guy is illuminated in Buckmaster's request for an apology, summarized by Cnet:
The attorney general, Buckmaster said, "has persisted with his threats despite the fact that craigslist:
http://blog.craigslist.org/2009/05/an-apology-is-in-order/
Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal? You know, why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away. I can't follow the logic on that at all. -George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty
The main part of the argument is that Craigslist has done nothing wrong to begin with.
They are protected by section 230. The threats and allegations are unconstitutional and IMHO slanderous.
It seems likes there's a purposeful implication that the Adult Section of Craig's List is that it's meant to be for prostitution. It's not.
The Adult Section is just like any of hundreds of online and print services meant to match people of similar interests. It's like Match.com, or Cupid.com for people who really intend to get physical. Often these people do not want a relationship and desire only one time meet-ups. Obviously a desire to do so goes against some conventions, and success in looking for that can be difficult. But there's nothing at all illegal about it.
One might suggest that a purposefully misleading portrait of the Adult Section as an intended service to promote prostitution is an agenda to aid in policing morality. That would be extremely dangerous precedent for a State's AG to pursue.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Government officials, including the president, get sued all the time. Because they are being sued pursuant to their job, their employer defends them. Hell, I was just a lowly Officer with the IRS back in the day and I managed to get myself sued once or twice. The government has some really good lawyers and I was glad of it.
Sometimes, things get even more indisidious. Back in the day (20+ years ago) every local district office of the IRS had a director. There were 66 of them spread around the country and they were the public face of the IRS. Ours was a good guy, totally in the "firm but fair" mode, who even had a sense of humor. He used to donate his time (very occasionally) to charity to sit in a dunk tank and let the public try to drop him into the water.
So what was his reward for trying to be open, transparent, and just plain *human* to the public? Not only did he get sued pretty much every week, lots of anti-tax protestors would go to various county courthouses in the area and file "common law liens." These bogus documents were a bunch of rambling nonsense that basically says "The IRS is illegal so the local director should be held personally liable for all the damage they cause." Said "damage" was calculated in various ways, ranging from just the amount the aggrieved citizen-idiot owed all the way up to some approximation of the entire amount of money collected by the IRS in that city that year, typically billions.
The clerks at the county courthouses eventually learned to recognize this crap and refuse to accept bogus documents for filing but that put them on thin ice; they are supposed to let anything be filed and let the courts decide if a filing is fraudulent. Sometimes they just held the filings until the lawyers could have a look. Most time, the filings just went through.
Our guy was a good person, making a good salary, filing all required financial disclosure reports that showed he never defaulted on a loan or was late with bills. But at the courthouse, there were filings showing that he was a multi-billion dollar deadbeat. The poor guy had the worst credit in the world. Getting a loan to buy a house or car or just getting a credit card was an exercise in frustration for him.
So the answer to your question is "Lots of government lawyers spend their time going to court, time that could have been better spent doing work in the public interest. The few people filing frivoulous actions waste lots of your tax money. That's what happens."
In the US, there are (at least) two types of prostitution, and two main groups of opposition.
Some prostitutes choose to be prostitutes, because it offers them the best income per unit time: they're just doing business. That's what many Americans, particularly libertarians, think of, when they advocate legalizing prostitution. In many countries, this has been the model they've taken.
Some prostitutes are not willing prostitutes -- they've been forced into it. This is primarily seen in the US with child prostitution, where we don't recognize the child's right to choose that particular profession, but in much of the world there is a large market for what is essentially sexual slavery.
Now, for the opposition: religious conservatives don't like the idea of sex outside marriage for a number of reasons. They're actively opposed to legalizing prostitution. Many other people are passively opposed to prostitution because they mentally model it as scabs crossing a union line called marriage, and dragging down the value of sex, to get all economic about it. This general group is going to oppose *any* type of prostitution, whether by choice or coercion.
The second type of opposition: many people oppose prostitution because either they're worried that even if it's primarily voluntary, it'll lead to a rise in involuntary/coerced prostitution, or they have decided that *any* prostitution is involuntary. (See Andrea Dworkin's work, for instance, where she generalizes to claim that any heterosexual act is essentially coercive. I don't agree, but it's unquestionably an influence.) So while this group -- typically on the left/liberal side -- might consider voluntary prostitution okay, they're still uncomfortable with the whole idea.
A lot of European countries have legalized prostitution while making pimping illegal and heavily prosecuted, which would tend (on first inspection) to select for only voluntary prostitution: just business. The problem with this is two-fold. Prostitutes find they make more money, and are safer, when they have someone to back them up in the case of a dispute with a client. One work-around is collectives, or unions, where prostitutes work with each other, but there's a fine line between that and pimping.
So it's not as simple as just saying 'legalize it'.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Certainly, diversity jurisdiction is one of the bases on which federal jurisdiction could be established here, but so is federal question jurisdiction.
Assuming that the federal statute under which the statutory claim is raised (I believe its the Communications Decency Act) doesn't provide for exclusive federal jurisdiction (which I don't know off the top of my head), they could have filed it in SC courts even given the diversity of citizenship. Neither federal question nor diversity of citizenship generally requires a case to be filed in federal court, they just provide a basis for federal court jurisdiction, giving the plaintiff the opportunity to file in federal court, and, failing that, the defendant the opportunity to seek to have the case moved to federal court.
No, they don't protect against murder/theft/etc. to enforce morality. They exist because each of those crimes infringes upon another citizen's liberty without their consent. Prostitution does no such thing.
Ride the skies
I'm betting you're an American.
You should read about Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia some time.
Here's an interesting article detailing what's happening throughout those areas: women are hired in country A, by agents from country B, who tell the women that they're going to country C to be housekeepers, maids, or work in manufacturing jobs. Once they leave their country -- and often, pay for the ticket -- their passports are taken and they've become illegal aliens who are enslaved, for all practical purposes. The local police are involved, so that doesn't do them any good, and they're physically prevented from going to their embassies, who don't seem to have any interest in helping poor women, anyway.
The current estimates range between half a million and four million women being held this way. I have no idea how accurate that is, but as such, I don't think it's anything like a gross exaggeration to make the claim that involuntary prostitution is real.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.