Will Darth Thiel now give Hulk Hogan the money he won't get from the court outcome?
Or is Hulk Hogan left as just a pawn in the game, with the court victory but no payout?
Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
491–500 of 566 posts
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if a conservative politician lobbies for adultery being illegal, and then a sex tape emerges of him cheating on his wife? That's important journalism. What if the CEO of a company intimidates an employee into having sex with him and secretly films it, and that gets released? That's also important journalism. There are lots of other ways sex tapes could be newsworthy: a famous person makes racist comments in it (…
There is a difference between reporting on the existence of a sex tape and publishing said tape. None of the examples you gave require the tape to be published.
Do you also think that good taste required reporting on the Mohammed cartoons without actually showing them?
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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 do…
> 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,
AIUI he was pretty much insolvent at the time due to an expensive divorce.
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sex tapes don't become newsworthy just because the subject is a celebrity What if the sex might have been non-consensual (see: Dominique Strauss-Kahn)? What if the sex is between a public official and his employee (see: Bill Clinton)? What if the sex is illegal (see: Eliot Spitzer)? The fact is that sex can be of interest to the public, which means video of that sex can also be of interest to the public.
In all mentioned cases the sex becomes sexual assault, which is a felony. It's very different from adult people consensually enjoying themselves.
Sorry? Engaging a prostitute is sexual assault?
How exactly is it "very different from adult people consensually enjoying themselves"?
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#495A 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…
How usual is it for the court to decline to stay enforcement? What's the reasoning used to not stay? Can this decision itself be appealed?
If it's true that the appeals court would be likely to severely reduce the damage amount, if not overrule the verdict itself, is it reasonable to claim that the decision not to stay enforcement is by itself unjust, in that it effectively robs the defendant of a chance to exhaust the judicial process?
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're the expert, but I don't see the harm of "maintenance". If Boella was wronged legally, he should be made whole. Whether he uses his own money to make his case doesn't change the correctness of the ruling. People use the courts to get payback all the time, in a variety of ways. It's not about what's right, its about what's allowed. People with a lot of money have a big advantage in that regard. If we try to chan…
> but I don't see the harm of "maintenance" It is right in front of your nose. Whatever your views of Gawker, Thiel destroyed a news company out of spite. That seems like maybe a little bit of a problem. > It's not about what's right, its about what's allowed. People with a lot of money have a big advantage in that regard. If we try to change that, we'll have to redo a lot of the legal system. Or, you know, revert to…
> It is right in front of your nose. Whatever your views of Gawker, Thiel destroyed a news company out of spite. That seems like maybe a little bit of a problem.
Thiel didn't destroy Gawker, Gawker destroyed Gawker. They willfully broke the law. Even put up a self-congratulatory article about how they'd been told to take it down and weren't going to.
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#497Earlier 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…
I keep coming back to a very simple policy: disclosure. When the ACLU pays for lawyers, it's not a secret and e.g. a judge, government official, etc. making decisions about the case does so with full knowledge of who's backing it.
As with campaign finance, this has two benefits: it avoids trying to enumerate all of the ways someone might try to game the system and it addresses free speech concerns by simply requiring attribution in an area where there's a strong public interest.
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference between reporting on the existence of a sex tape and publishing said tape. None of the examples you gave require the tape to be published.
Do you also think that good taste required reporting on the Mohammed cartoons without actually showing them?
Yes. (But I do think the right to tasteless speech is important and worth defending)
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#499Libel 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…
And engadget and kotaku and most of the other tech related websites you probably read. Also its a good lesson to other sites to police content to ensure no one says anything bad about billionaires. Thank god for thiel protecting us from horrible things like censorship!
> Also its a good lesson to other sites to police content to ensure no one says anything bad about billionaires.
Or maybe to not publish sex tapes?
Re: Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
#500And nothing of value was lost.
A billionaire used his money and influence to destroy an organization because he doesn't agree with what they say. I can think of at least one thing of value that was lost.
Money and influence would have got him nowhere if Gawker had stayed within the law and/or common decency.