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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

#501

Post by paul_f »

dsabanin wrote: post #133
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Precedent this sets"? I think "Don't publish a illegally made video of people in a private moment or ignore court orders to take down the video." to be a rather positive precedent, don't you? That's the sort of chilling effect on media we should all be applauding. Thief merely funded a court battle that had merit (in this case, quite a lot of merit) that Bollea probably could have won on his own. I fail to see what…

A lot of questionable things are becoming illegal to publish lately. For example, it's illegal to film what's happening inside a slaughterhouse[1]. Some people are getting into trouble for filming cops[2]. I'm not saying Gawker shouldn't be punished, but legality doesn't imply morality and free press in theory could be helping to review and change the immoral laws. The chilling effect from Gawker bankruptcy will be t…

Strawman. Nobody is suggesting this is illegal. But you should get your arse sued off civilly if you do this.

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

#502

Post by rayiner »

jacquesm wrote: post #485
rayiner wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm just cautioning extrapolating from that, to the conclusion that the party with more money wins the lawsuit. That's only true up to a certain baseline. > And that's just civil proceedings, in criminal proceedings the odds are stacked even worse against a defendant without funds. Maybe. The DOJ's co…

> That's only true up to a certain baseline. And that's true enough for me. > Maybe. The DOJ's conviction rate isn't appreciably different between divisions, including white collar crime: > (all around 90%). Interesting report, thank you for the link. I think 90% in and of itself is high enough to warrant scrutiny, any higher and it would be grounds for an investigation. Japan (99%) and China (98%) appear to be signi…

> And that's true enough for me.

But it's not true as a general proposition, nor are you excluding an irrelevant class of litigation. Much (most?) commercial litigation is between well-funded parties (e.g. a big company and it's insurer).

> Interesting report, thank you for the link. I think 90% in and of itself is high enough to warrant scrutiny

The government should only bring a lawsuit if it looks at the evidence and decides it can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Generally, that's in the 95% certainty range. A jury should only convict if it comes to the same conclusion. Thus, it should be quite unusual for the jury to acquit. If the jury is acquitting in 25% of cases, that means the government is bringing lots of prosecutions it shouldn't be bringing.

It's true that over the last 30 years, the government has gotten much more conservative about bringing prosecutions. That's a good thing. Many might disagree with the law underlying, say, the Silk Road case, but it's hard to say the government didn't base that prosecution on a wealth of evidence.

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

#503

Post by dragonwriter »

lmm wrote: post #500
Negative1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Law suits occasionally come to incorrect results (the appellate process exists to mitigate this risk, and the higher burden of proof in certain cases, notably criminal cases, exists to direct which side those errors tend to fall on), punishing people who are within the bounds of law and common decency.

Therefore, a deep pockets agent funding every potential lawsuit from other parties they can find (or stimulate), increasing the number of such suits and the likelihood that they will go to trial, can, simply by taking enough swings, eventually impose a combination of legal costs and judgements that will financially destroy the target; actual unlawful behavior may reduce the time it takes for this strategy to succeed, but isn't necessary for it to work.

So, given Theil's demonstrated proclivities in the multiple lawsuits he was funding against Gawker, I don't think the statement that Gawker would have been okay if they had stayed within the law is warranted.

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

#504

Post by acdha »

methehack wrote: post #355
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…

If justice is blind, why should funding matter? In other words, to limit the means of funding would be to admit that your bank balance affects the outcome when the whole point of the judicial system is to achieve fairness.

It's possible for the actual justice system to be fair but to still have unfair outcomes if money can influence who brings cases and who can afford to defend them, especially without some sort of loser pays or frivolous lawsuit system. Say you get hit with some lawsuits lawsuits. In each case, the justice system works perfectly — there's a full discussion of the merits in court and after careful deliberation the rulings were all in your favor. Did you still win if the legal fees were enough that you had to cut back your business?

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

#505

Post by jacquesm »

rayiner wrote: post #502
jacquesm wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's only true up to a certain baseline. And that's true enough for me. > Maybe. The DOJ's conviction rate isn't appreciably different between divisions, including white collar crime: > (all around 90%). Interesting report, thank you for the link. I think 90% in and of itself is high enough to warrant scrutiny, any higher and it would be grounds for an investigation. Japan (99%) and China (98%) appear to be signi…

> And that's true enough for me. But it's not true as a general proposition, nor are you excluding an irrelevant class of litigation. Much (most?) commercial litigation is between well-funded parties (e.g. a big company and it's insurer). > Interesting report, thank you for the link. I think 90% in and of itself is high enough to warrant scrutiny The government should only bring a lawsuit if it looks at the evidence…

> To the contrary, 90% is about right. The government should only be bringing lawsuits if it has a good faith belief it can establish the facts beyond a reasonable doubt. BRD is about 90-95% probability.

There is a huge fallacy underlying your numbers. 90% is about right if the number of false convictions is acceptably low. 90% is a terrible number if it should contain a large number of false convictions.

The 'establishing of facts beyond reasonable doubt' only happens for cases that actually go to court, in the light of the above mentioned asymmetry in resources you're going to end up with a lot of cases that will never make it that far. Some will claim this is efficiency but I don't really feel comfortable with an 'efficient' process that places large numbers of people in lock-up. The chances of getting it wrong are fairly high in a system that aims for a certain percentage of convictions, after all there are two solutions to getting that percentage, the first is to ensure that only the 'good' cases make it through the system, the other is to railroad the bad ones through as well and make sure that a conviction is secured anyway.

In fact, one could argue the only way to look at it is in a precision/recall manner, how many cases that were known to be solid turned out to be false positives and how many cases that were dropped were the false negatives (cases that should have been won but were not, for instance because the defendant was wealthy enough that they could afford a large defense).

This is of course all only relevant if you actually care about justice rather than about convicting as large a number of people possible once they enter the judicial system, and I'm not at all sure that that is the goal of the systems in place in the various countries. Too many people depend for their livelihood on large numbers of people getting convicted.

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

#507

Post by thaumasiotes »

lmm wrote: post #498
thaumasiotes wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Ah, my question is ambiguous between "showing the Mohammed cartoons would be in bad taste" and "showing the Mohammed cartoons can't be allowed because it would be in bad taste".

So let me make some points myself:

1. Publishing the cartoons themselves makes a variety of statements that can't be made by reporting on their existence without showing them.

2. Those statements have great value, independent of any questions of taste.

3. Everything slg says about the difference between publishing a report that a sex tape exists vs publishing the tape itself applies in full to the Mohammed cartoons.

The right to tasteless speech is important and worth defending, but I'm not trying to do that here. I want to counter the argument slg is making, which is that tasteless reporting should be prohibited when you could approximate the same report in better taste. The raw facts always have an inherent value beyond a reporter's interpretation of them.

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

#508

Post by viscanti »

j2kun wrote: post #454
RickHull wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems like drawing the line between connection or no-direct-connection isn't right here. It seems like helping fund people who have a legitimate case is good. It's hard to see a downside for helping people get justice. But it's not always as easy to draw the line on frivolous vs legitimate lawsuits which complicates things here.

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

#509

Post by nailer »

igorgue wrote: post #357
nailer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't say that if some private aspect of your own life was revealed to the public without your consent.

You are the kind of person who likes the first amendment only for compliments, it supposed to be for these kind of stuff, the ugly shit. Again, he's a public figure.

Not American, but the Hogan story wasn't under trial. The sex tape was. The jury made the right choice.
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