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$10 Million Lawsuit Against Wikipedia Editors "Stragetically" Withdrawn
First time accepted submitter The ed17 (2834807) writes with new developments in the $10 million defamation lawsuit against a few Wikipedia editors. From the article: On the same day the Wikimedia Foundation announced it would offer assistance to English Wikipedia editors embroiled in a legal dispute with Yank Barry, the lawsuit has been dismissed without prejudice at the request of Barry's legal team — but this action is being described as "strategic" so that they can refile the lawsuit with a "new, more comprehensive complaint."
Do the editors do any proofreading of these submissions whatsoever? Massive typo in headline and it's on the front page.
No wonder this site is so shitty and dead these days.
The trouble is that it's very, very difficult to encapsulate the fact that you can construct statements that are strictly true but which convey a false impression in any sort of legal standard that wouldn't be dangerously vague and subjective. And, while sometimes inescapable, 'vague and subjective' are not virtues in legal standards. Any such move would markedly expand the zone of dangerous uncertainty about what you might be dragged into court and ruined for saying, since you would have no way to reliably predict what might strike a given judge or jury as 'strictly true; but excessively insinuates'. In practice, given the cost of losing, the uncertainty zone tends to become an exclusion zone.
They should have filed a response. ANY response. That locks the case in and makes it impossible for the complainant to withdraw it without consent.
Then they could have filed the SLAPP response.
By delaying (likely to get way too many unnecessary ducks in a row, but that's how lawyers work) they now have lost that opportunity. The complaint will be filed again -- not necessarily in California -- and including elements that can't be dismissed by SLAPP elements.
What a shame.
E
In the early days of the Internet when Usenet carried a large proportion of total traffic, the technical community operated a technical measure to control Usenet abuse, the rather harshly titled Usenet Death Penalty. Essentially, when behavior was deemed deeply pathological and all other remedies were exhausted, the abuser's traffic was cancelled as a measure of last resort until the abuse stopped.
Lawyers are the new sociopaths on the Internet, abusing everything they touch instead of advising their clients to act as good network citizens. If they'd figured out Usenet back then, you can bet your bottom dollar that they'd have been abusing it too, and probably gaining themselves and their clients some richly deserved technical pushback. (It's a minority of lawyers to blame of course, but the majority just look the other way.)
Alas those days are long gone, and there is no negative feedback anymore applied to parties who engage in Internet abuse as a business plan. TFS / TFA is about one such case, among thousands of others in recent years. Copyright and software patent abuse, ridiculous C&Ds, baseless DMCA takedowns, hostile domain removal or outright domain theft, these things all fall under the category of pathological behavior on the Internet.
This situation was predictable in the absence of negative feedback.
I never heard of Yank Barry before but now I know all about his extensive criminal record.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It's not just about Wikipedia. Mr. Barry's press agent claims he is also suing the National Post (Canada) for publishing a critical article, "The world according to Yank: Montrealer with checkered past gets Nobel nod, or does he?"