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Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

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Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#451

Post by manish_gill »

whack wrote: post #54

Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy. By building an entire business model around such practices, Gawker is not only spreading disinformation, it is also crowding out more reputable news sources that could have better helped inform the public. The only criticism I can give in this entire tale, is that it shouldn't take a billionaire to sue and win judgement against slanderous publishers. Such re…

> Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy.

You seem to not understand what freedom of speech means. As someone who actually lives in a place where people use libel and slander laws to sue people left and right and get offended, consequence being censorships and a tightening of restrictions on speech, I'd kill to have the kind of freedom Gawker did.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#452

Post by ohnomrbill »

lotso wrote: post #178
rs999gti wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially given Thiel's motive that "they outed me" - come on, Thiel's sexuality was probably the worst kept secret in the Valley. When you pose shirtless on a gay cruise, I think it's fairly safe the rest of the world didn't need Valleywag to tell them of your homosexuality. Does all that evidence matter? Shouldn't it be up to Theil when and where he outs himself instead of blog like Valleywag doing it for him?

> Shouldn't it be up to Theil when and where he outs himself instead of blog like Valleywag doing it for him? Agree, but it isn't illegal.

But it is wrong. And Theil got revenge by backing a lawsuit which stood on its own merit - which also isn't illegal.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#453

Post by jacquesm »

rayiner wrote: post #447
jacquesm wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(3) is proof positive the absence or presence of funds has too much influence on the outcome of court cases. If all that stands between a judgment one way or the other is a pile of cash then effectively there is no such thing as justice and this means that more often than not the party with the smallest bank account will lose. I'm fine with the concept of 'maintenance' but at the same time I feel that there is such a…

(3) is more a statement that "you need a certain amount of money to successfully fund a lawsuit" than "more often than not the party with the [bigger] bank account will [win]." Two slightly different concepts. Beyond that: the "merits" of a case is unknowable. Courts don't have the "merits" in front of them. They have the evidence and arguments developed by the parties. Consider the Gawker case: did Gawker publish th…

> Spending a lot more money than that isn't going to get you a much better result.

And that's precisely the point, if you don't have that money (and this can be quite a lot) then you're out of luck. The linked case is about a celebrity worth quite a bit of money and still it wasn't enough to get the case decided in his favor, it needed yet another - bigger - millionaire / billionaire to step in to sway the case. I don't see what could prove this more conclusively, a 'certain amount of money' can be more than what most mortals have access to.

It it wasn't for Thiel to have an axe to grind with Gawker this would have not happened.

And that's just civil proceedings, in criminal proceedings the odds are stacked even worse against a defendant without funds.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#454

Post by j2kun »

RickHull wrote: post #350
hinkley wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say the same thing, but I think this is the key phrase: | litigation where the funder has otherwise has no connection with the merits of the dispute. I think those organizations and other social policy groups can demonstrate that they have a vested interest in the merits of the dispute. In fact that litmus test may be overbroad, allowing any corporation for whom the case is useful to their business str…

Except Thiel arguably has "connection with the merits of the dispute". He feels that Gawker violated his privacy as well as Hogan's, and he wants Gawker to be punished and/or discouraged from further similar behavior. Just like the EFF or ACLU.

Just curious: aside from historical precedent, what objective "connection with the merits of the dispute" makes the ACLU more appropriate than Thiel to fund a privacy suit? Is it just that the ACLU has trained lawyers who can weigh in on the law? Would the attitude toward Thiel change if Thiel happened to have a law degree? Would it change for the ACLU if they were purely funding it and not actually providing lawyers?

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#455

Post by rayiner »

grellas wrote: post #278

A few thoughts: 1. The pressure point here was a court ruling declining to stay enforcement of the $140M judgment pending appeal. This left Gawker having to post a $50M bond in order to avoid enforcement proceedings by which its assets could have been seized and its business literally dismantled. Gawker may or may not ultimately prove to have a successful basis upon which to get this judgment reversed but, without a…

> I think we are otherwise left a little unsettled over what the promiscuous scattering of third-party money throughout the courts might do. Whatever it is, it likely is not good.

I disagree. Division of labor and specialization is almost always economically efficient. Litigation finance is just the embodiment of that concept applied to litigation.

Traditionally, litigation has been financed either by: (1) the plaintiff; or (2) the plaintiff's lawyer (in the form of a contingency arrangement). Neither of those parties are the right ones to valuate or finance lawsuits. They don't have a sufficiently cross-sectional perspective of the industry. Lawyers are in fact notoriously bad at valuing cases.

Litigation funders can become experts at valuing good lawsuits, and financing lawsuits so that entities don't have to divert their own capital for those purposes.

Note also: in a system like ours that relies on lawsuits to protect property and other rights, forgone meritorious lawsuits are a source of economic inefficiency. Gawker is a great case in point. If a judgment against Gawker makes it go under, that means the harm caused by Gawker's existence exceeded the value created thereby. If Gawker didn't get sued simply because Hogan lacked the liquidity to bring the suit, that would've been a net loss to the economy--an entity sticking around that literally does more harm than good.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#456

Post by CPLX »

argonaut wrote: post #425
whyenot wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ACLU and NAACP are non-profits that are supported by a large number of members, publicly report their spending, and are governed by leaders chosen through a democratic process. When they back a lawsuit, they are very transparent about it. What Peter Thiel did was secretly fund a lawsuit by someone else in order to exact revenge (or depending on your point of view, to provide a service to society). I think there i…

Rather than just relying on what you think, you would need to propose a legal framework that can actually be enforced, for distinguishing between the two. Because it is legally ambiguous. Because if your framework becomes "non-profit that publicly reports spending is okay," what's to stop a billionaire from donating millions to their own non-profit, governed by a bunch of their "elected" friends (membership fee = $1M…

That would be fine. The hypothetical billionaire non-profit would have disclosure rules, and the judge could determine if their charter was sufficiently related to be able to weigh in. This isn't actually all that complicated, we do it for amicus filings all the time.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#457

Post by chillacy »

FilterSweep wrote: post #330
pmarreck wrote: post #80

I'm torn between everyone having their privacy and ripping the band-aid off by exposing everyone's private life at once so we see how things really are instead of how we think them to be For instance, I'd bet that many marriages are largely keeping up appearances while hiding some big secrets which would put the whole concept of "Western marriage" at risk (perhaps justifiably)

Hmmm.... Do you need to see how everyone's private life is, or is this just curiosity? Sure, if you can live with the unnecessary consequences of how some people might react when their private lives are exposed - Ashley Madison Hack[0] provides a salient recent example [1]. Furthermore, it is obvious to many that some marriages are all for appearances. But they are also for children. They're also to appease nuclear a…

Though I am personally very pro-privacy, I do think about the parent poster's thoughts sometimes. I have a thought that goes like this:

Masturbation. For a long time, this was taboo, both for families and in public discourse (sitcom innuendos, not really taught in lots of sex ed classes, NASA not commenting on space masturbation). We didn't really talk about it, so you'd end up with kids doing this and feeling ashamed. On one hand I see the pro-privacy argument that my business is private, and if gawker posted a blog post on my masturbation habits, it would be deeply intrusive. However in the absence of privacy, we'd see that this is not a big deal, and everyone does it. The latter scenario is the world I'd want to live in, the former is the world I do live in.

So privacy allows us to live lives as we would like, while maintaining the appearance that we're living our lives as society allows. This is very good, but at the same time, you could just relax society's restrictions with the same result.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#458

Post by idlewords »

rayiner wrote: post #455
grellas wrote: post #278

A few thoughts: 1. The pressure point here was a court ruling declining to stay enforcement of the $140M judgment pending appeal. This left Gawker having to post a $50M bond in order to avoid enforcement proceedings by which its assets could have been seized and its business literally dismantled. Gawker may or may not ultimately prove to have a successful basis upon which to get this judgment reversed but, without a…

> I think we are otherwise left a little unsettled over what the promiscuous scattering of third-party money throughout the courts might do. Whatever it is, it likely is not good. I disagree. Division of labor and specialization is almost always economically efficient. Litigation finance is just the embodiment of that concept applied to litigation. Traditionally, litigation has been financed either by: (1) the plaint…

Considerations of economic efficiency are a complete non sequitur. You're either being skilfully provocative, or making a category error.

Justice is not a resource to be allocated, and in this case all we're discovering the price of is a billionaire's bruised ego.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#459

Post by idlewords »

davidmr wrote: post #364
idlewords wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term was coined as a perjorative (by Teddy Roosevelt) and then co-opted as a term of honor by the journalists he was attacking.

At least in my schooling, Upton Sinclair was held up as the very model of a muckraker, and he was certainly anything but (2) above. Perhaps sensationalist on occasion, but strongly principled.

Roosevelt was applying the term to journalists at publications like McClure's. There's a great book about this period by Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit) that I can't recommend highly enough.

Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

#460

Post by [deleted] »

biztos wrote: post #410
tptacek wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the cases ACLU is involved in are against the government, not private entities.

If we disallow cases because the defendant is not the government, doesn't that invite someone to disallow cases because the defendant is the government? (Which of course happens all the time, but still...)

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