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$10 Million Lawsuit Against Wikipedia Editors "Stragetically" Withdrawn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."
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.