Most Insightful, Funniest Comments Of The Week On Techdirt

from the keep-'em-coming dept

In past weeks, we've usually had a few comments that charted high in both categories, but no such luck this week. There was not a single crossover comment in the top ten of either category. This week's winner in the most insightful came from Marcus Carab (once again -- which might make him the first two-time winner in this category...), responding to someone on Friday's post about Sony's regular attack on hackers and makers. The original comment that Marcus was responding to was chiding Techdirt, saying that our posts this week were some sort of reaction to seeing that the future isn't going to be the "fairyland" we want. Sort of an odd statement, but Marcus responded, by pointing out that we have seen where things go in the future, and we're reasonably worried about its impact on those who can't adapt:

It's quite easy to spin what you say in the other direction. Techdirt has indeed seen where the future goes, and it is not towards greater protection and stronger IP laws. Those things are essentially impossible: there is no such thing as effective DRM and no such thing as unpirateable content, and there never will be. Given the nature of what is happening in the world since it became so gloriously interconnected, it is inevitable that information's tendency to be free will overpower its tendency to be expensive.

Given that, when you see companies and creators attacking their fans, throwing temper-tantrums or reducing the value of their product with DRM and removed features, one thing is abundantly clear: they are digging their own graves. Much more frightening is when the government is complicit in this, because it erodes respect for the rule of law and teaches entire generations that those in power are clueless about the realities of technology.

And so a blog like Techdirt highlights these things, because it is the right of every consumer to criticize commercial entities, and because it is the duty of any informed citizen to criticize the government when it violates people's guaranteed rights.

The comment that came in second (juuuuust below Marcus'), from someone named Mike42 (I'm assuming he's not a clone of me), responded to someone on the post about how "piracy" sometimes looks remarkably like "freedom," in noting how freedom of speech and copyright law relate to each other:

The problem is this: copyright is not an inalienable right. Free speech is. Where the two conflict, free speech must win out.

If you're not an American, your confusion is understandable. If you are, then your confusion is unforgivable.

In the "editor's choice" category, I'll highlight two other comments I thought were insightful. SageScape discussed music publishers complaining about a free archive of public domain scores and saying they used the sales from such scores to fund new artists, by noting that this made little sense:

As I noted yesterday over on my blog Legally Sociable, this makes no sense. It is the profit from selling/renting sheet music composed by long-dead composers like Beethoven at above-market prices that allows the G. Schirmer company "to bring out more composers’ work"? Insofar as this even makes sense, they can only mean one of two things:

1. Traditional music publishers can only continue to publish public domain scores if they can continue to sell it at monopoly prices (e.g., $30-50 for "[a] set of parts for a mainstream string quartet", according to the NYTimes article).

Analysis: Good riddance. IMSLP will publish it for free. Deadweight loss triange: gone.

2. Traditional music publishers can only afford to take a bath on contemporary composers if it can subsidize them with profits from public domain scores of dead composers.

Analysis: Whatever this is, it's not a business argument. There are plenty of reasons to support new composers (and musicians generally) that have nothing to do with business, of course. One may think that the arts are intrinsically valuable, or may want to give back/pay it forward, or may simply want the prestige of having one's name connected rising talent as a "patron". All fair enough. But there's no business reason for a traditional music publisher to subsidize new talent with monopoly money. Why should it do that? It would make much more money if it simply sold the old public domain stuff and told new composers to take a hike. (Unless, of course, it does make money off the new composers....)

Just because a music publisher may have used some of its profits to support the arts doesn't mean that they should be able to assert legal rights they don't have to public domain musical scores just because the Internet is threatening their traditional business model. The arts can be supported much more directly and efficiently. There's no need to expand copyright law to allow a revenue stream to continue flowing into the publisher's pockets that a trickle may eventually find its way into the tip jar of the up-and-coming composer.

And then a nice short one on the post about cheap video games being more profitable for video game makers, fogbugzd responded to the question posed by the article I linked to that wondered if this was "coincidence or magic" by paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke:

To the uninformed, basic economics in action can appear indistinguishable from magic.

Ok. On to the funny. The winner here, by a wide margin was a commenter by the name of hmm, who went biblical:

In the beginning, people (apparently) created stuff without copyright, and the corporate firmament was dark and without form.

And then came a lawyer who said "LET THERE BE COPYRIGHT". and there was copyright. And he saw it wasn't good (but it could make a large amount of cash).

And he said "let there be a division between the heavens (where all the men in suits could live) and the earth (where all the criminals...sorry customers..could stay) and the peaceful universe was torn in two....

Now the question that the filthy dirty 'criminals' (for thusly had they been labelled by those on high) asked was "well if it takes incentive to copyright stuff, how was anyone incentivized to sit there and create a copyright law in the first place?". And the Lawyers were exceedingly angry saying "question not your master, for he is always right, and yeah verily are compulsory licenses great, woe unto he that uses p2p". and the lawyer did smite the questioner with lawsuits of fire and brimstone forever and ever, amen

Coming in second was an Anonymous Coward's parody of some of my critics:

Mike

I shall give the appearance of having neither read nor understood anything you have ever written despite feeling the need to comment on almost everything you have ever written.

To do so, I will first need to say you have taken a stance you have never taken.

Why are you in favour of child molestation
or
Why do you support piracy
or
Why do you insist every business follow exactly the same business model

I will now castigate you for taking these positions that you have never taken.

When you cite evidence I will dismiss the citing of evidence as being pointless.

When you describe the general thrust of an argument I will complain that you are not citing specific evidence.

I am eternal
I am ever present
I am troll.
and

I do not possess the capacity to feel shame.

Freetards are destroying us all

On that note, I'll leave everyone to gear up to comment on another week of posts...

Filed Under: comments

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the and-the-winner-is... dept

Once again this week, it looks like one comment took home the gold medal in both categories. And it wasn't even close, even if it was on a story that was just published late Friday morning. So step right up Dark Helmet and claim your prize for both most insightful and funniest according to folks here, on your comment about Redskins owner Dan Snyder and his complaint that a photograph of him with scribbled devil markings on it was somehow "anti-semitic":

Ah, I see. Dan Snyder objects to the to squigly lines drawing devil horns and a goatee (by cracky) on his image because they're anti-Semetic. Dan Snyder, you see, is against images and depictions of racist and culturally insensitive nature.

Hey, fuckhead. You own an NFL football team based in the nation's capital called the REDSKINS! Are you kidding me? It's an insensitive term with a stereotypical logo of an American Indian, the gall of which is only supplanted by the fact that the team is located in the home city of the governing body that raped and pillaged their people? Who the hell are you crappin'?

How about some Irish immigrant owning a football team called the New York Porchmonkeys (I'm just bringing it back)? Or that Saratoga Slants? Maybe the Talahassee Towelheads? Portland Pollocks? Ooooh, the Memphis Micks (that one is close to my heart)?

Way to be a hypocritical polesmoker there, D-bag....

I almost feel like we shouldn't even bother looking at other comments after that one, but just to satisfy everyone's curiosity, the next two on the most insightful list were both short and sweet, so I'll include them both. The first was a comment on Egypt's decision to shut down the internet, where an anonymous commenter made a simple point:

If your government shuts down the internet, shut down your government.

And, in discussing the study financed by NBC Universal that showed that the amount of "piracy" online was driven, in large part, by their own failure to provide legitimate alternatives, Marcus Carab pointed out a key point that is so frustrating to so many of us. In responding to another interesting comment about the amount of data in the Library of Congress, Marcus stated the unfortunate truth:

That quote highlights another thing worth noting here: we now live in and age where it's technologically trivial to have the entire library of congress in your room, and yet thanks to copyright, none of us do.

Over on the "funny" side was a rather wry comment from anonymous user, poking a bit of fun at the people who believe that kicking people off the internet will lead to increased music sales. So, when Egypt shut off its internet access, that commenter asked:

I wonder how much music sales went up during this period.

And in third place, thublihnk responded to Feargal Sharkey's complaint that thinking about increasing fair use in the UK was nothing more than "intellectual masturbation" by putting it into the appropriate context:

I know sometimes when I'm alone in my apartment I like to turn the lights down low, maybe light some incense and just think about the proper way to treat intellectual property in relation to content creation and distribution in the interconnected age of today.

Thanks for another week of fantastic commentary.

Filed Under: comments, funny, insightful

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week

from the and-the-winner-is dept

It seemed like most folks enjoyed last week's post highlighting the funniest/most insightful posts of the week, as rated by the community, so let's keep it up. And, we're kicking it off with the one comment that flat out dominated both categories. It got more votes than any other comment ever on the site, and sits at the top of the charts for both funny and insightful (though, it got about twice as many votes for funny as for insightful). So, step on up Johnjac, you win for this lovely comment parodying the RIAA's threats to ICANN concerning the .music domain:

Billions of children are born with ears every year. What are doctors doing to make sure these ears are not being used to listen to illegal music?

RIAA would love to work the medical professionals to stop music piracy at its source, the human ear. We strongly urge you to take these concerns seriously... we prefer a practical solution to these issues, and hope to avoid the need to escalate the issue further.

Coming in second on the insightful scale was (interestingly) also a commenter taking a letter written by industry folks, and "rewriting" it. In this case, it was commenter stellarwaif, who wrote a rebuttal letter to the letter written by a bunch of companies in favor of censoring the internet, via domain name seizures and anti-due process laws like COICA:

Here's my rebuttal letter. I encourage all innovative companies to read and if they agree, to sign this letter!

We run companies large and small that represent diverse aspects of America’s intellectual property community. While our employees live in different regions of the country, and work to produce a variety of goods and services, they have several important things in common – they work hard, they are committed to quality and innovation and they welcome competition. However, allowing a small group of companies to prevent fair competition in the marketplace cannot be tolerated. Supporting draconian intellectual property laws and punishing consumers for freedom of choice diminishes the market’s ability to freely innovate and build upon past successes and failures, and cannot be tolerated. In order to protect our free enterprise system, and the standard of living it has contributed to our nation, it is critical that we multiply our efforts to encourage development of new marketplaces, identify and break down the barriers created from unsustainable business models, and provide even greater freedom to consumers for what we create and produce.

Thus, we are appalled by the effort and energy behind Operation in Our Sites. The actions dictated on November 29, 2010 once again demonstrated that, just as in the physical world, defendants and courts are presented with indefensible arguments and poor evidence to distinguish between legitimate innovative businesses and archaic and failed enterprises that abuse the law and profit from denying the ingenuity of others. We believe that the online marketplace is the rightful domain of consumers and our task as creators is to respect their voice – and urge you to stop acts against the kinds of domains that you have targeted without due process nor respect for property rights and the rule of law. Fortunately, there are many options available for sites to continue to provide creative business ideas, and we believe that your efforts will drive consumers further away from failed online ventures and services that have worked hard to remain in business -- without fostering customer support.

We encourage you to work with your colleagues in the Administration and the Congress toward defeat of the principles central to S. 3804 – the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. The legislation crafted by Senators Leahy and Hatch was unanimously approved by the uninformed Senate Judiciary Committee and roundly condemned by numerous organizations and media outlets, and will undoubtedly be reintroduced this congress. The proposal continues to pervert law enforcement techniques at the heart of “Operation In Our Sites” and attempts to ensure that private corporations can force the government to stifle competition and fair use without judicial oversight and without fairness under the law. The legislation will ensure that targeted sites will evade U.S. jurisdiction by creating a new class of registrar and domain name system unimpeded by governmental interference, regardless of source. In addition, the Leahy-Hatch proposal provides yet another level of protection for entrenched U.S. rights holders by establishing the legal framework necessary to protect failed business models of domestic sites and starving legitimate and creative businesses of the right to compete and thrive in a fair and level marketplace that all consumers can access. The dangerously imbalanced measure would allow American law enforcement officials and U.S. courts to create an island of stifled innovation and propel thriving businesses away from the Internet within the U.S. market while further smothering consumer choice and innovation so as to allow select businesses to reap diminishing financial gain for themselves.

We hope that you will cease dedicating any resources to Operation in Our Sites and reconsider support for the rule of law and for due process, and work toward legislation for a free, balanced and open marketplace, by the consumer, and for the consumer.

I won't post the actual comments, but a whole bunch of comments on the response to Jim D'Addario were voted highly, so you can read Ima Fish on the government's role in protecting business models, the official Anonymous Coward on how shooting first and asking questions later can backfire, Karl reminding us that the conflation of counterfeiting with copyright is a big part of the problem here, and last but not least, Chosen Reject highlighting a Samuel Adam's quote concerning those who "love wealth greater than liberty."

On the funny side, not only did Johnjac take the top position, but he took the second place spot as well, in response to our post about the Reagan library indoctrinating children to hate freedom of the press, because accurate reporting might harm people, John warned us as well asking:

Why is Techdirt irresponsibly reporting on this?

What if some harm comes to the library or worse its staff due this report?

For Shame. For Shame.

Close behind that was a comment from Mr. LemurBoy, choosing some rather groan-inducing gags concerning the Australian politician, who seemed to think it was a good thing that the Catholic church silenced Galileo for a century and assumed that governments could do that to Julian Assange:

Oh, it's not a joke. Just think of the gravity of the situation.

Maybe the politician thinks he's the center of the universe?

Separately, the story of the 82-year-old woman, who had trouble going through airport security in Canada with her prosthetic (gel-filled) breast (due to breast cancer) and a physical inability to lift her left arm as required by the naked scanner, led to many funny comments. Kevin pointed out the details of what she should have done, including getting a background check on the "technicians, assemblers, testers, nurses, doctors, and anyone else who may have handled the prosthetic." And then both pixelpusher220 and Dark Helmet had a nice run with attempts to Monty Python the situation.

Filed Under: comments, funny, insightful

Does It Violate The Law To Fire Someone For Their Facebook Comments?

from the just-might... dept

Michael Scott points us to a discussion highlighting a recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that suggests companies cannot fire employees for things like complaining about their boss on Facebook. The NLRB apparently stated that such complaining about the boss is a "protected concerted activity" under the NLRA. It's been a long time since I was up-to-date on my labor law knowledge (even though I do have a degree in the subject), but this seems like a pretty extreme ruling. If people were fired for actually using Facebook to organize collective action, I could understand it, but it's not really clear that just bitching about your boss really qualifies. That said, it's not clear that it's particularly smart to (a) bitch about your boss on Facebook where they might see it or (b) for a company to react by firing any employee who does that. Neither move makes that much sense. The company definitely seems to be overreacting, but to stretch that to say it's a violation of the law doesn't make much sense.

Filed Under: comments, labor law, social networks
Companies: facebook

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week

from the new-feature-time dept

Okay, we're launching a new feature this week, to see how it goes. We've had these voting buttons on comments for a while, which will show when certain comments are voted to be particularly insightful or funny, but thought we might as well do some more to promote those. So we're experimenting with highlighting the most insightful and funniest comments from the past week.

On the most insightful comment, the highest voted comment came from Mike C. in response to the article about the fines the Canadian recording industry had to pay for infringing on the copyrights of artists, his comment, titled Let me see if I get this right read:

1) The major labels end up paying $45 million for over 300,000 cases on infringement. That works out to $150 per incident and yet they want $150,000 per incident here in the USA.

2) The labels get to CONTINUE to perform the acts of infringement as long as they "promise" to pay the artists infringed against in a "timely" fashion.

Yeah... and they wonder why we call them two-faced...

In second place, we had a tie, with one comment from Spaceboy, responding to a question as to why it was unconstitutional that the DMCA blocks you from modding your own devices by explaining why people should be able to do what they want with a product they bought:

It's unconstitutional because it breaks fair use. I can't rip a DVD without breaking DMCA, yet I have the right to make legal backups of all my media.

In the case of the PS3, it's a product, and as consumers we should be able to do whatever the hell we want with it. I can mod my car to make it go way faster than the speed limit, but I am not breaking any laws until I actually go over the speed limit. The Jailbreaking software adds functionality back to the PS3 that Sony stripped away, and no one should be put in jail for modding their hardware.

Voted equally insightful was this comment from Hephaestus concerning Twitter's response to the government's request for info on various Wikileaks volunteers. Hephaestus decided to make a larger prediction, noting that "this seems to be the year that the US Government will try to quash the 1st amendment and privacy on the internet":

I wonder if this will work out better for the US government than it did for the record labels. I some how doubt it. With RIAA and the labels you had an annoyance. With the US government you have a world superpower that is a threat to the first amendment and free speech on the internet. Confiscating domain names, shutting down peoples access to financial services, violating the first, fourth, and fourteenth amenedments of the constitution, calls for the assasination of the head of a foreign news organization. All in all power blatantly abused at the highest levels of government.

With RIAA and the labels actions we have seen a slow gradual change in technology. With the US government getting involved in online affairs I expect to see a huge, and very fast increase in encryption usage and distributed systems. The words "Wake Up Call" come to mind.

I wonder who will win this battle over free speech, freedom to express our thoughts, and privacy on the internet? The billions of us or couple tens of thousand of them.

For the funniest comment, the runaway winner (by far), was on our post about California's new higher copyright infringement fines, and the comment came from a non-registered user with the accurate username of Mr. Smarta** who broke out the sarcasm with his post:

Those numbers are incorrect. After careful counting and using systems of evaluation that are perfect and without contest, the actual number of jobs lost due to piracy is about 32.5 billion jobs last year. Got that??? Over five times the planet's entire population was laid off!! You can't contest that. Every single person was hired and fired over six times. My boss called me in and said "Sorry. We have to let you go. Piracy is rampant and cost you your job." To which I replied "We sell engine blocks!!!" So there you have it. Someone trading a CD online cost some poor fast food employee his job because that one CD screwed up the burger he was making.

And $58,000,000,000??? What a load of crap. I'll have you know that the actual loss last year alone was over three hundred times the gross domestic product. Got that?? Three hundred times of our stuff just suddenly was taken out and shipped overseas. Know what we have left now? Rocks!!! That's it! Rocks, and maybe some sand somewhere. Piracy cost us everything the United States owned. I hope you're happy now. Download one copy of the movie 'Inception', and suddenly some other country repo's the entire continent. What a bummer...

Nicely done. Coming in second was a comment on our story concerning the World Erotic Art Museum suing Thomas Hawk for posting some photographs he took at the museum on Flickr. In its defense, the Museum noted that there was an "unspoken and unwritten understanding" that visitors wouldn't post such photos online, to which a commenter named Burton questioned:

If the understanding is both unspoken and unwritten, how is it conveyed, mime?

And, in the honorable mention category, we have a comment from Crade, which scored the combined highest on both the insightful and funny scales, in discussing the TSA's warning that wearing scanner resistant clothing means they'll have to grope you:

"My favorite might be the undergarments with the 4th Amendment printed in metallic ink"

They should make some that say
"If you can read this, you are violating my rights"
or maybe
"Am I safe yet?"

And there you go... Everyone's favorite comments of the week...

Filed Under: comments

University Told It Can't Sanction Students For Their Facebook Comments

from the free-speech-and-all... dept

Last year we had a discussion about some students at the University of Calgary, who were put on probation for making some comments about a professor on Facebook. Apparently, the students went to court to protest this move and said that such a move violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. It seems a court agreed. Michael Geist points us to the news that the court has said that sanctioning the students based on Facebook comments is a violation of the Charter. The University had argued that the comments were defamation (when they looked more like a general opinion) and that it was not subject to the Charter. The court absolutely disagreed. Nice to see free speech being respected.

Filed Under: canada, comments, free speech, sanctions, university, university of calgary
Companies: university of calgary

How Is It That A Random Comment On Reddit Leads To Your Friend Getting Tracked By The FBI?

from the that-doesn't-seem-right dept

Last week, we wrote about the guy who found an FBI tracking device on his car. His friend then posted the pics to Reddit, leading the FBI to show up at the original guy's house, demanding the tracking device back. One odd part of the story is that in the discussion that ensued, the law enforcement agents showed the guy a post his friend (the one on Reddit) had made. This is how Wired described that part of the story:

Afifi retrieved the device from his apartment and handed it over, at which point the agents asked a series of questions -- did he know anyone who traveled to Yemen or was affiliated with overseas training? One of the agents produced a printout of a blog post that Afifi's friend Khaled allegedly wrote a couple of months ago. It had "something to do with a mall or a bomb," Afifi said. He hadn't seen it before and doesn't know the details of what it said. He found it hard to believe Khaled meant anything threatening by the post.

"He's a smart kid and is not affiliated with anything extreme and never says anything stupid like that," Afifi said. "I've known that guy my whole life."

Someone in our comments quickly pointed out that the "blog post" in question was actually a comment on Reddit that was in response to a discussion about silly security procedures, and the entire comment reads:

bombing a mall seems so easy to do. i mean all you really need is a bomb, a regular outfit so you arent the crazy guy in a trench coat trying to blow up a mall and a shopping bag. i mean if terrorism were actually a legitimate threat, think about how many fucking malls would have blown up already.. you can put a bag in a million different places, there would be no way to foresee the next target, and really no way to prevent it unless CTU gets some intel at the last minute in which case every city but LA is fucked...so...yea...now i'm surely bugged : /

I'm having trouble seeing how anyone could read that and think there's anything suspicious at all about it. But, as Bruce Schneier notes, what's really bizarre is how that comment doesn't just lead to the guy being tracked, but his friend having his movements tracked.

If they're doing this to someone so tangentially connected to a vaguely bothersome post on an obscure blog, just how many of us have tracking devices on our cars right now -- perhaps because of this blog?

Schneier also wonders how many people are combing through the depths of sites like Reddit to totally misread comments out of context, and then using them to start surveilling someone's whereabouts.

Filed Under: comments, fbi, reddit, tracking

Reuters Dumps Anonymous Comments: Throwing Out A Bunch Of Babies With The Bathwater?

from the it's-not-the-anonymity dept

This probably isn't a surprise. Lots of traditional journalism folks have been busy slamming "anonymous" commenters online, often falsely blaming them for things they did not do. Earlier this year, we pointed to an excellent defense of anonymous commenting, by the Washington Post's Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, with the key line being:

For every noxious comment, many more are astute and stimulating. Anonymity provides necessary protection for serious commenters whose jobs or personal circumstances preclude identifying themselves. And even belligerent anonymous comments often reflect genuine passion that should be heard.

We've seen it here. We've always allowed anonymous commenters, even as we've continually added more and more features to make it worthwhile to identify yourself. And yet, if people do want to be anonymous, we're fine with that. To be honest, in over a decade of doing this, I've really seen no difference in either the level of "bad" or "good" comments from anonymous commenters as I have from named commenters. We have anonymous commenters who are brilliant, insightful, well-informed and add to the discussion all the time. In fact, with a few of them, I can even recognize that they're the "same" commenters via their writing style (even as some of them are totally anonymous, via proxies). At the same time, some of the commenters who freely admit who they are, can be some of the rudest, most obnoxious and uninformed commenters around. And, of course, the reverse is true as well. Certainly there are plenty of anonymous clueless commenters and plenty of insightful named commenters. The point is that the anonymity is the wrong thing to blame. We've seen no indication that anonymity leads to a higher level of clueless comments.

Unfortunately, however, some have decided to go in a different direction. Reuters is apparently now the latest to ban anonymous comments on their site. This is unfortunate, as among the big news providers out there, Reuters often seemed more "aware" of how to best embrace the internet, but this move seems like it's a mistake. It won't stop snide comments, but they may lose many valuable community members who, for whatever reason, did not have enough incentive to reveal who they were.

Filed Under: anonymity, comments
Companies: reuters

Sorry, But We Don't Just Hand Out Information On Our Commenters

from the we-believe-in-the-first-amendment dept

I've mentioned in the past that we receive about one legal threat per month around here. However, until last week, we had never (knowingly) received a subpoena for any information on the site. Last week, however, we were emailed a subpoena that had apparently been issued to try to find out some information about commenters on a particular Techdirt blog post, which the lawyer's clients were claiming were defamatory. We've discussed multiple times on the site both the importance of protecting anonymity online, as well as the fact that many US federal courts have recognized that anonymous blog comments are to be judged against the First Amendment when determining if the identity of their author should be revealed.

Since this is something that we certainly believe strongly in, we're not about to just roll over and give out information on commenters, without a clear legal requirement to do so. Our policy is pretty firm that we believe that it's proper to protect the interests of our community, within legal boundaries (of course). There were some oddities with this subpoena -- issued from a Florida court -- including the fact that it had apparently initially been issued way back in January and sent to a random law firm in Philadelphia that I've never heard of, which has never represented Techdirt/Floor64 and certainly is not authorized to accept subpoenas on our behalf. Thus, we never received it when it was first sent out -- but were finally emailed a copy last week.

The actual subpoena came from a lawyer representing John Maragoudakis, who goes by the name John Markis, and runs a company called Trusted Traditions, which sells stuff on eBay. The blog post in question was from way back in 2002, and was about some people who were arrested for "shill bidding" on eBay. In 2009, someone posted a comment, making certain allegations about Maragoudakis/Markis and Trusted Traditions that he claims are false and defamatory, and he has already taken legal action against the individual he believes was making such posts around the web.

After looking over the details, and trying (and failing) to get the lawyer who issued the subpoena on the phone, Paul Alan Levy from Public Citizen Litigation Group helped us respond in writing to the subpoena, pointing out some of the basic procedural errors, but also (more importantly) highlighting the key First Amendment issues raised, along with the associated case law, to make it clear that we don't take such requests lightly, and don't just hand over information because something official-looking shows up demanding it.

What's even odder, in this case, is that there's already a lawsuit going on by Maragoudakis/Markis against the person who he believes posted the content in question. In other words, he's already pretty sure he knows who wrote the content in question -- meaning that they already have a perfectly acceptable means of using the discovery process with that individual to find out if he made the comments on Techdirt. So, they don't need us to say if it's him. And, if it's not him, then not only is the subpoena almost certainly past the statute of limitations on defamation, but it's highly questionable that we should just reveal information on a commenter because someone hopes that it's another person they already sued. Either way, it comes across as a fishing expedition, based on the hopes that sites won't protect the rights of their community, and will just hand over the information. We're not about to just hand such information over without a real legal basis (even if some publications out there apparently don't protect their community's anonymity).

You can read our entire response below. None of this means, of course, that commenters are immune from having their info subpoenaed, but we will satisfy ourselves that there is a legal basis for the request before handing over any information.

Filed Under: anonymity, comments, free speech, subpoena

Indian School In Singapore Sues Parent Because Others Commented On His Blog

from the safe-harbors dept

I'm very happy that the US has very broad safe harbors for liability in the form of Section 230, though I still don't think such a law should be necessary. It should be common sense that you don't blame a third party for actions of someone else. And yet, even with Section 230 safe harbors, third parties get sued all the time in the US. And, it's even worse in other countries where there are no such protections, and some judges will put liability on a third party, creating horrible chilling effects. Over in Singapore, there's a lawsuit that could be worth following when it comes to the proper application of liability on blog comments. Reader Veri alerts us to the news that a school based in Singapore (though it runs schools around the globe) the Global Indian Foundation (GIF), sued a parent who keeps a blog about the school, not for anything that parent wrote, but what some others wrote in the comments, claiming that the comments are defamatory.

The guy who's being sued, Ajith K Narayanan, points out that he didn't write the words in question, that the terms of service on his blog make it clear that commenters are responsible for their own language and, finally, that there wasn't any defamation anyway because the comments are true. The latter two arguments are interesting, but it's the first one that's the important one. If Singapore properly applies liability to those actually responsible, the case should just get tossed out on that first issue, and the other two issues shouldn't matter at all. If the school really wants to go after the commenters for defamation, it should be required to show that there's a strong likelihood that the material was defamatory, and then request a subpoena for the commenters' information (at which point the blogger can decide whether or not to fight it). But simply suing the blogger and claiming he's liable for the possible defamation takes third party liability way too far, and hopefully the court in Singapore recognizes this.

It should be noted that there are some other oddities involved in this lawsuit as well, many of which are summarized at this Techgoss post. It appears that the school initially filed criminal charges, but those were quoshed by a judge earlier this year. Then there's the really bizarre back and forth from April, that began with a report in an Indian newspaper that police had arrested a former GIF employee, claiming that he had started the blog and that it was a "fake" blog to discredit GIF. That report claimed that Narayanan had revealed this ex-employee to be his co-blogger in an affidavit. Yet, in a post on the site, denies pretty much all of that. This seems like a bit of a sideshow, but it does make the whole case a bit more confusing...

Filed Under: blogs, comments, defamation, safe harbors, singapore
Companies: global indian foundation