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eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

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Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#101

Post by Scoundreller »

frabjoused wrote: post #94
Scoundreller wrote: post #74

eBay was distracted trying to destroy a newsletter and AMZN ended up growing by many eBays. eBay is now worth $22b market cap, as high as $52b in recent times. AMZN is now $1.5t, about double since the period of time in question, or about 14 - 34 eBays (editted out a large portion of what I originally wrote about how many eBays of market cap AMZN has been gaining because I was off by a year in my window of time).

This is meaningless. A few employees did this. Companies are composed of people. The whole company wasn't busy being distracted. They just had a worse business model.

A few employees... starting in the C-suite focused on a critic with a newsletter that looks like this: https://www.ecommercebytes.com

(nothing wrong with the content, it's a good trade rag but c'mon, you gotta be thinking about it day and night to sign off on a plan to go through with what was done against that)

Business models can be changed/improved. eBay has been quite stagnant.

Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#102

Post by akoboldfrying »

mometsi wrote: post #48
low_tech_love wrote: post #34

The filings said the couple had been left "emotionally, psychologically, and physically" terrorised. I always find it interesting that, when people sue other people/companies for some kind of harassment, they have to claim something like this. Shouldn’t it be obvious? Like, they got weird stuff by mail and got stalked. That should be enough? What if they didn’t actually got scared, what if they laughed at it? They we…

Forensic psychology is a weird discipline that evolved more from legal precedents than social science research. There are standards for what counts as victimization, and incentives to categorize negative emotional responses as e.g. recurring episodes rather than chronic or permanent problems. Those legally-defined turns of phrase are like pinball bumpers that they have to hit to activate different levels of compensat…

I laughed darkly at the pinball metaphor -- somehow the word "activate" is exactly right.

Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#105

Post by roenxi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70
emilfihlman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damages shouldn't be subjective but based on the acts committed.

> Damages shouldn't be subjective but based on the acts committed Congratulations, you’ve turned the courts into a contest between theoretical models of what an act is “worth” instead of considering the facts and circumstances at hand.

Are you saying that as aggreement or disagreement? The court is already to settle dueling theoretical models, and it will still settle them by considering facts and circumstances. It should be quite exceptional for a crime to depend on the victim's mental state since someone who spends years learning how to accept the world as it is shouldn't be legally penalised.

Although I'm going to say that in the legal sense we might already be handling things this way. I'm sure the judges have considered this in depth.

Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#106

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #73
thebruce87m wrote: post #5

> The acts of intimidation included sending live insects, a foetal pig and a funeral wreath to the Steiners' home in Natick, Massachusetts. If someone I knew claimed that eBay execs were sending them things like this I wouldn’t believe them. It’s like something from a TV show.

I want to know if the execs were putting the roaches into a package themselves in their mahogany offices or if they paid someone to do it... CaaS maybe? (Cockroaches as a Service)

there already are pigeons as a service PaaS

Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#107

Post by willcipriano »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70
emilfihlman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damages shouldn't be subjective but based on the acts committed.

> Damages shouldn't be subjective but based on the acts committed Congratulations, you’ve turned the courts into a contest between theoretical models of what an act is “worth” instead of considering the facts and circumstances at hand.

As opposed to the concrete model of "she was a million dollars worth of sad"

Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#108

Post by sidewndr46 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #63
actionfromafar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wenig maybe made a "counter offer" to Baugh of some sort? With such people, you never know. Maybe a horse head or some other refreshing token of appreciation.

that would be witness tampering, a major crime in itself.

I don't think these people are the kind of people concerned they might be committing a crime

Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#109

Post by grepfru_it »

anigbrowl wrote: post #72
batch12 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you show your fist to a child or to Mike Tyson it's the same threat? Based on the meaning of the word threat, yes.

No. Think forward and imagine you escalate on the threat, by punching your interlocutor. Your act is the same in both cases, but the physical injury to Mike Tyson will likely be minimal whereas that inflicted upon the child would be significant, perhaps even severe. To say they were the same would be like considering two similar mathematical operations to be equivalent without considering the quantities involved.

Emotional injury would also occur, the child is growing and would interpret the act drastically differently than a world champion boxer

Re: eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case

#110

Post by eszed »

codetrotter wrote: post #37
thebruce87m wrote: post #5

> The acts of intimidation included sending live insects, a foetal pig and a funeral wreath to the Steiners' home in Natick, Massachusetts. If someone I knew claimed that eBay execs were sending them things like this I wouldn’t believe them. It’s like something from a TV show.

I wonder where the execs got hold of those things. Did they buy it on eBay and have it shipped from a seller? Or did they go and put a dead pig in a box themselves? Messed up either way, and good that an end was put to their harassment of the bloggers.

The Edmund Scientific catalog used to sell all of the things on the list, so it was probably there (are they still in business?), or somewhere similar.
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