News Corp. Pays Out For Voicemail Hacking Victims

New submitter SandmanWAIX sends this excerpt from ABC.net.au: "Rupert Murdoch's media empire has made huge payouts to 37 phone-hacking victims, including actor Jude Law, singer Danii Minogue, and former British deputy prime minister John Prescott, their lawyers said. ... The company has set up a multi-million-pound compensation scheme for victims of phone hacking in a bid to avoid further costly civil lawsuits. ... It has also made a payout of 2 million pounds to the family of murdered British schoolgirl Milly Dowler, while Mr. Murdoch made a personal donation of 1 million pounds to charities chosen by her family.'"

Comments

Cheaper than going to jail

[tomhudson]

Mr. Murdoch made a personal donation of 1 million pounds to charities chosen by her family

... and he gets a tax deduction!

Re:Cheaper than going to jail

[cavebison]

It simplifies tax code

Hardly. You're talking about 1 provision out of hundreds, if not thousands.

allowing the government to rise more taxes

Many ways to do that without crippling charity donations, which would be the result. Companies would not give to charity *at all* if it was not a tax deduction, and they have many other ways of reducing tax. Charity donations is not the only thing that reduces company tax. They'll just do it another way.

thus better funding social security and foreign aid, thus lessening the need for charity.

Charities do a lot more than is covered by social security. Social security does not run the Make a Wish foundation, or give money to cancer research. Anyway, spending on social security is a matter of government ideology, not money. They could move money from defense to SS if they wanted to. They don't want to. Money is not the issue, the government is not broke.

Everyone wins

No, charities will lose and many will disappear. Companies simply will not give if there is no deduction. Sorry but you're living in a dream world.

Jail time

[Anonymous Coward]

Not good enough. He deserves to be in jail along with his son. He shouldn't be allowed to buy his way out.

Re:Jail time

[mjwalshe]

And serious corruption in the Met police (in the UK the Met handles some serious crimes that the FBI does in the USA - they are not just the London local police force)

Re:Jail time

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're referring to "equiry", yeah, he made a typo one out of the two times he used it. Piss off and die; typos suck, but it's not worth posting about.

If you're referring to "enquiry", that's the correct British spelling. I'm a Yankee myself, so I don't spell it that way, but my mind is not so small it cannot hold two spellings for the same word. Piss off and die in a fire; assholes like you give the rest of us a bad name.

Re:Jail time

[shilly]

There *used* to be a time when people were educated enough to know the difference between enquiry and inquiry. I shan't attempt to teach you; I shall merely point out that it is not about US vs UK usage; and that the correct term in this instance is inquiry:
  http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/

Re:Jail time

[MightyMartian]

Now he'll just have to spend the money on the prosecutors and politicians to make criminal charges go away. Don't worry, as the public anger about this wanes, everyone will pad their pockets and it will be business as usual.

Re:Jail time

[TapeCutter]

It's another one of those things where there isn't a common usage much less an unwritten rule

Enquiry = A question, most commonly used in the context of an individual asking for information from an organisation.
Inquiry = A formal investigation.
Both terms are in common usage here in Oz, OTOH I have never heard of "fettling".

Re:Jail time

[EdIII]

Giving a link to an article that uses the word with an "i" is not supporting evidence for you being correct. An article is a generous term considering it is really just a news blurb by an anonymous author. You just searched for the first article using the spelling of the word you find correct.

So we are to believe this anonymous author used the word with an "i" and that all of the sudden means this is not about the spelling of a word, but that each word means something different?

Both terms essentially mean the same thing, with most dictionaries claiming they are equivalent and noting the US or UK usage.

Now if you want to claim education here, please provide a more comprehensive etymology of both words for us. In other words, please provide a stronger case why there is a difference and you are oh-so-so smart and lament about times past in which people were somehow more intelligent and educated.

Re:Jail time

[buglista]

First hit for "inquiry vs enquiry uk": http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammartips/grammar-tip-enquiry-inquiry.asp

An enquiry is when I enquire about why my broadband is down. An inquiry is when a judge (or similar) is having a formal dig into something, like Leveson is now.

I don't expect .usians to know this - or even really .ukians - but do allow for the possibility that your "inquiry" is not our "inquiry". Or if you don't allow for that possibility, please do not start talking about pants.

Jail time

[whoever57]

There is an equiry going on in the UK discussing this and other issues, but the answer is simple: people need to go to jail. Not only is there evidence of illegal activity (accing voicemails and emails), but now it looks like there is evidence of perjury (lying to the enquiry).

There is also evidence of obstruction (destruction of computers). It's quite clear that the illegal activity is at the highest levels of News Corp. People at the highest levels need to go to jail. Paying out this amount of money means nothing to billionaires.

A weak start

[the eric conspiracy]

The rest needs to be resolved by severe criminal penalties, jail time and the requirement that the Murdoch empire be broken up. News Corp should also lose all of its broadcast licenses world-wide.

Re:A weak start

[HangingChad]

News Corp should also lose all of its broadcast licenses world-wide.

That would be too much like actual justice. Corporations have the rights of citizens but none of the actual responsibilities if they break the law.

Re:A weak start

[HangingChad]

Put a 100K people out of work because a few executives broke the law, yeah that's actual justice!

If you believe in the free market, then believe another news organization would form to take their place. That's the problem with treating corporations like people. If you want to give them collective rights, then the people who work there have to accept collective responsibility.

Your way they get the rights, but no consequences.

Re:A weak start

[Renraku]

But the very problem with corporations is that they want to be treated like people when it benefits them, and they want to be faceless hoards when it benefits them. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

We have to decide, now, what a corporation is. We need strict definitions. We need to decide if we want to pierce the corporate veil and go after the people that ordered it, the people that carried it out, the whole corporation, upper management, or any combination of the above. If we do nothing, the corporations will continue to expand their powers. Before long, we won't be able to do anything at all, because they'll own the government.

Absolute joke

[Tastecicles]

This so-called compensation fund doesn't even figure as pocket change to News Corp. Murdoch is a multi billionnaire ($7.6bn at FYE 2011 according to Forbes). That's his /cash/ worth, not counting his liquable assets. If he gave a Dollar out of his own pocket to every man, woman and child on Earth he would STILL BE A BILLIONNAIRE.

This is in the same league as Microsoft "complying" with compensation orders from the courts in the US by issuing *vouchers for discounts on its own software*.

The consumer is still getting bent over and dryfucked, but legally.

Where Are We?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have a much higher opinion of my fellow vigilantes if instead of launching DDOS attacks against sites that the public never visit* they obtained incriminating evidence against their targets. They are supposed to be hackers, aren't they? Why aren't I hearing about leaked emails detailing how Murdoch himself knew about these crimes or how the *AA have been screwing over the people they claim to represent?

*Bringing down the RIAA site seems completely pointless when Joe Public would never see it anyway.

Only Britain?

[Anonymous Coward]

We only hear about this phone hacking scandal happening in Britain, but why not anywhere else? It's at least imaginable that other News Corp operations were going by the same playbook. Or that if it was so technically easy that even News Corp reporters could do it, couldn't something similar have been done by someone else in other countries, but we just don't know about it yet?

Re:Only Britain?

[Sir_Sri]

They were in bed with the police in the UK. They might have liked the idea elsewhere, but you need to find a police force that will knowingly go along with it, and that might be harder to find.

John Prescott and State Secrets

[asdf7890]

One of the points mentioned in the news coverage over here was that John Prescott had high security clearance in his position as deputy prime minister, so the "hackers" could have gained access to significant secrets. Am I the only one that finds this worrying? Why was The Right Honourable Bumbling Hypocrite of Hull given any access to supposedly secure information when he wasn't even capable of setting a pin on his voicemail?! Why would anyone else leave such information in voicemail anyway? I'm hoping this is just Prescott's camp trying to big up him and the charges against Murdoch rather than a sign of how shite our intelligence services are...

Re:Nice start.

[HangingChad]

It's truly astounding how those "slippery slopes" apparently only go in one direction in your mind.

The world would be a better place without the Murdoch media empire. I'm for risking the slippery slope long enough to put that box of snakes out of business.

Re:Nice start.

[b4dc0d3r]

Be careful, that's the way it starts. As culture evolves, one group after another becomes the target, and you don't undo the prejudice against previous targets, you just add to it.

That's why it's called a slippery slope. First, it's hard to get back up it. Second, once you get moving it's hard to slow down.

We have laws in place for these things, they should be applied in this case. That's what civilized people do.