The Chilling Effects Of A SLAPP Suit: My Story

from the no-fun-at-all dept

Last week, I presented at the always excellent Personal Democracy Forum event in NY, talking publicly for the first time about the lawsuit that's been filed against us. Specifically, what I chose to talk about is the real chilling effects that such a lawsuit can have -- and has already had on us. We've written about SLAPP defamation suits for many, many years. But it's (unfortunately) different (and much, much worse) to experience it yourself. You can see the video here, which got more emotional than I had expected it to be.

If you agree that these chilling effects are a dangerous attack on free speech, please consider supporting our ongoing reporting via any of the following methods: ISupportJournalism.com, Patreon.com, our own Insider Shop, or perhaps you want to buy some t-shirts, hoodies, mugs or stickers. However you support us: thank you. Related to this, I also want to thank both the staff and attendees at PDF, who were amazing, kind, thoughtful and helpful to me over the course of the event.

Separately, Ars Technica just published a long deep dive article on the claims that the plaintiff in the case against us, Shiva Ayyadurai, has made. It's a worthwhile read.

Filed Under: anti-slapp, charles harder, chilling effects, defamation, email, free speech, shiva ayyadurai, slapp, techdirt
Companies: floor64, techdirt

Some New Techdirt T-Shirts (And Hoodies, And More...)

from the i'm-spartacus dept

New Gear From Techdirt: I Invented Email »

Okay, it's been a long time since we ran some t-shirt campaigns around here, and we've been hard at work on some new designs that we think you'll enjoy. First up, we've got one that we've had a few people asking for: our brand new I Invented Email gear, allowing you to express your opinion on certain events. Separate from that, we've got some brand new Techdirt logo gear in two styles. Check 'em out. The email t-shirts are only available for a limited time, so get them while they're here.

Filed Under: email, t-shirts, techdirt

Techdirt's First Amendment Fight For Its Life

from the the-first-amendment-has-to-mean-something dept

As you may have heard, last week we were sued for $15 million by Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email. We have written, at great length, about his claims and our opinion — backed up by detailed and thorough evidence — that email existed long before Ayyadurai created any software. We believe the legal claims in the lawsuit are meritless, and we intend to fight them and to win.

There is a larger point here. Defamation claims like this can force independent media companies to capitulate and shut down due to mounting legal costs. Ayyadurai's attorney, Charles Harder, has already shown that this model can lead to exactly that result. His efforts helped put a much larger and much more well-resourced company than Techdirt completely out of business.

So, in our view, this is not a fight about who invented email. This is a fight about whether or not our legal system will silence independent publications for publishing opinions that public figures do not like.

And here's the thing: this fight could very well be the end of Techdirt, even if we are completely on the right side of the law.

Whether or not you agree with us on our opinions about various things, I hope that you can recognize the importance of what's at stake here. Our First Amendment is designed to enable a free and open press — a press that can investigate and dig, a press that can challenge and expose. And if prominent individuals can make use of a crippling legal process to silence that effort, or even to create chilling effects among others, we become a weaker nation and a weaker people because of it.

We are a truly small and independent media company. We do not have many resources. We intend to fight this baseless lawsuit because of the principles at stake, but we have no illusions about the costs. It will take a toll on us, even if we win. It will be a distraction, no matter what happens. It already has been — which may well have been part of Ayyadurai's intent.

I am beyond thankful to the many of you who have reached out and offered to help in all sorts of ways. It is heartening to know so many people care about Techdirt. At some point soon, we may set up a dedicated legal defense fund. But, in the meantime, any support you can provide us will help — whether it's just alerting people to this situation and the danger of trying to stifle a free press through meritless lawsuits, or it's supporting Techdirt directly (or, if you have a company, advertising with us). As always, you can support us directly as a Friend of Techdirt, or check out some of the other perks you can get in our Insider program. You can also support us via Patreon.

If freedom of expression and the press is to actually mean something, it needs to be protected, not stomped on with baseless lawsuits that silence independent voices and opinions.

Filed Under: defamation, first amendment, free press, free speech, techdirt
Companies: floor64, techdirt

Techdirt 2016: The Stats.

from the another-year-in-the-books dept

Another yearly tradition around here is that, soon after the new year, we post some details about some of the stats we've got on visitors/commenters and such. It's pretty fun, and this will be the 7th year that we're doing it. For reference, here are the posts from 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010. For what it's worth, for comment stats, we're using our own internal logs, but for traffic we're using Google Analytics, which isn't perfect -- and which many people block via tracking blockers, so the stats may not be entirely accurate -- but since we're focused on comparative info, it's likely that the results are pretty good, since those who block trackers should have a somewhat proportional effect across the various years.

In 2016, we went back up to having visitors from 239 "countries" (as defined by Google Analytics... which I know bugs some people who insist there aren't that many countries in the world) after a drop to 235 in 2015. Of course, at the bottom of the list, we're talking pretty random places, so that's kind of meaningless. At the top of the list, though, as always, is traffic from the US, which represented 65.66% of all our traffic. It's almost always right around 66%, but has been dropping marginally the last couple of years (66.95% in 2014, 66.82% in 2015). In 2016, the UK passed Canada for 2nd place on traffic, but it was pretty close (6.45% of traffic, vs. 6.34%). Canada and the UK are always neck and neck in terms of traffic, with Canada nudging out the UK in 2013 and 2015, but the UK beating Canada in 2014 and again this year. Evens and odds. Australia and Germany, once again, retain their spots as the 4th and 5th biggest visitors -- both of which have kept those spots for years. The next five countries are also the same: India, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and New Zealand. The only difference in 2016 was that France edged out the Netherlands, which had been just slightly ahead of France the previous few years.

After India, the top Asian countries were the Philippines and Singapore, also flip-flopping (last year it was Singapore on top of the Philippines, but the year before it was the Philippines ahead of Singapore) -- but the difference in traffic between the two is basically a rounding error. Japan and Israel (if you consider Israel part of Asia...) round out the top 5. If you don't count Israel as being in Asia, then swap in Malaysia.

The top five European countries were already mentioned in the global top 10, but if you want to know the next 5 European countries, you've got: Spain, Italy, Ireland, Russia and Finland. This is a bit different than last year. Russia wasn't in the list last year, but we had a few stories this year about Russian internet trolls that resulted in a bunch of comments yelling at us about how we were full of shit... so... hmmm... The entrance of Russia into the list bumped Norway out of the top 10, which is too bad. I like Norway.

Across both North & South America, of course, we get most of our traffic from the US and Canada, but Mexico, Brazil and Argentina make up the next 3, with Mexico passing Brazil after a few years of being behind. In Africa, as always, South Africa sent the most traffic. Before last year, the only real traffic we got from Africa was from South Africa, but last year there was a bunch from Kenya -- we thought mainly because a Kenyan copyright lawyer had flipped out about a post we did on Kenyan copyright law and wrote an angry blog post claiming we were defaming Kenya. But, traffic from Kenya continued to be notable, coming in second after South Africa (about half as much traffic), and Nigeria was right behind Kenya. After that, there was much less traffic, but still some from Egypt and Sudan.

For basically every year, we joked about how we would get one single visit each year from Christmas Island, but last year, it went away. We wondered what we'd done to offend whoever it was... but this year they were back again, with one single visit. There were six "countries" this year that sent a single visit: besides Christmas Island, there was also Curacao, St. Barthelemy, Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau and Tuvalu. For the second year in a row, we got zero visits from North Korea, after getting two visits in 2013 and an astounding four visits from North Korea in 2014.

As is always the case, the country with the longest average visits is... Gibraltar. But, as with every year, that's because there aren't that many visitors from Gibraltar, and one of them is one of our most prolific readers and commenters, PaulT, who takes credit for helping Gibraltar lead the charts in terms of average time of visit. If we look at countries that actually send significant traffic, last year New Zealand and Canada led the way for average time on the site. This year, India stepped up, followed by Canada and New Zealand (the US is next, followed by Australia). India also leads the way of major countries in terms of pages per visit, with New Zealand next.

We always point out that our city charts are a bit meaningless, given the hugely different populations in different cities, but the top five this year are the same as the past few years: New York, London, LA, Chicago and SF. SF and Chicago flipped positions. Washington DC retains spot number 6 for the second year in a row (after not being in the top 10 for a while), followed by Toronto, Seattle, Houston and Sydney (the same names as last year).

Once again, Chrome was the browser of choice for people visiting the site, this time breaking through the 50% mark with 51% of all visits being via Chrome. Safari was 22% and Firefox was 17%. Firefox was down a bit, while Safari was up quite a bit. There was still some Internet Explorer traffic (5%) and Microsoft's new browser, Edge (2%) and even a tiny bit of Opera traffic as well (1%) and a bunch of other random browsers bring up the rear. Remember when Microsoft was a monopolist in the browser market and no one would ever catch up? Fun times.

For the second year in a row, Android edged out iOS visits, but it was still pretty damn close. Visitors using Windows visited more than 4x those using Macs (which surprises me a bit...) and we still have a small percentage (~3%) of visitors using Linux. Somewhat astoundingly, the majority of those Windows visits came from people still on Windows 7. I'm guessing that these are people visiting from offices where they haven't gone through a (very, very necessary) upgrade yet. Windows 10 was the second most, but it was much lower than Win7 visits.

In terms of ISPs, Comcast leads the way, followed by Time Warner Cable. This should be no surprise at all, as those two dominate the market these days. Verizon has a strong third place showing, followed by Charter. AT&T is pretty far down the list, once again.

As for mobile devices, the iPhone easily leads the pack, with 31% of all mobile visits, followed by the iPad with another 12%. All the rest are tiny, tiny slivers of a huge variety of Android devices, none alone getting more than 1.5%. The most popular Android devices for viewing Techdirt are basically any Google Nexus model and any Samsung Galaxy S model (S5, S6 and S7).

As for where our traffic is coming from, this chart looks pretty similar to last years: We really pride ourselves on the fact that so many people come directly to the site, as it shows the kind of loyal community we've built up. Of course, the one difference from last year is that the percentage from social has dropped -- and that's, no doubt, because we basically haven't "played the game" on social networks to try to use them to drive traffic. This is something we've been talking a lot about internally. We certainly don't want to go all clickbaity, like so many other sites, or those who completely game the system. But we know that social media drives traffic to lots of news sites these days, and we're not nearly as effective there as we should be. It's something we hope to work on in 2017. In terms of other sites driving traffic, Reddit continues to lead the way, followed by Facebook and Twitter. Hacker News is next, though much lower than the rest.

In terms of search traffic, most of the inbound searches are searches on some form of "Techdirt" or "tech dirt" which isn't too surprising. In terms of other searches that drive some traffic, "Walter O'Brien" continues to lead the way for the second year in a row, as people do a search on the guy who seems to have fibbed his way to creating a TV show about his almost certainly fictitious life. We also seem to get a bunch of traffic to this story any time someone tries to figure out the lyrics to the song "Louie Louie."

Now, onto the lists:

Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2016:

1. No, A Judge Did Not Just Order Apple To Break Encryption On San Bernardino Shooter's iPhone, But To Create A New Backdoor
2. 71% Want The Dark Net Shut Down, Showing Most Have No Idea What The Dark Net Is
3. 56% Would Drop ESPN In A Heartbeat If It Meant Saving $8 A Month On Cable
4. President Obama Claims He Cannot Pardon Snowden; He's Wrong
5. Once Again, Piracy Is Destroying The Movie Industry... To Ever More Records At The Box Office
6. How The US Government Legally Stole Millions From Kim Dotcom
7. AT&T Mocks Google Fiber's Struggles, Ignores It Caused Many Of Them
8. Congrats, FBI, You've Now Convinced Silicon Valley To Encrypt And Dump Log Files
9. As Its CEO Continues To Claim It Doesn't Throttle, T-Mobile Spokesperson Confirms Company Throttles
10. Forbes Site, After Begging You To Turn Off Adblocker, Serves Up A Steaming Pile Of Malware 'Ads'

It should be noted that the Kim Dotcom story is actually from 2015, but still got a ton of traffic this year, in part because Dotcom has kept a link to it as his pinned tweet, and any time there's some news about his still ongoing cases, people tend to go to that story. If I try to squint and find a pattern in those stories, I'd say people seem to like when we call out bullshit claims from legacy companies or government. Not a surprise, but still interesting.

2016's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:

1. No, A Judge Did Not Just Order Apple To Break Encryption On San Bernardino Shooter's iPhone, But To Create A New Backdoor: 343 Comments
2. Holy Crap: Wells Fargo Has To Fire 5,300 Employees For Scam Billing: 283 Comments
3. FBI Boss Blows Past Policies, Guidelines, His Own Staff To Bring Back Clinton Email Investigation: 235 Comments
4. NBC Delayed Story About Trump's Access Hollywood Recording Over Fear That He Might Sue: 220 Comments
5. Our 'Copying Is Not Theft' T-Shirt Seems To REALLY Upset Some People: 210 Comments
6. What The Election Means For Stuff Techdirt Cares About?: 202 Comments
7. Homeland Security Wants To Subpoena Us Over A Clearly Hyperbolic Techdirt Comment: 197 Comments
8. Hillary Clinton Looks At Her Campaign's Many Missteps, Decides To Blame James Comey For Her Loss: 185 Comments
9. Somehow Everyone Comes Out Looking Terrible In The Effort For Election Recounts: 177 Comments
10. President Obama Is Wrong On Encryption; Claims The Realist View Is 'Absolutist': 175 Comments

Once again, as we point out every single year, there is almost no overlap between the stories with the most traffic... and those with the most comments. Just because a story gets a lot of traffic, doesn't mean it gets a lot of comments, and just because a story gets a lot of comments, doesn't mean it gets a ton of traffic. Though, it is a first this year that the top story is the same in both lists (and that's the only story that is in both lists). Most of the most commented stories here are political stories, and the long comment threads tend to be a small group of people throwing political feces back and forth at one another. I'm so glad the election year is over.

And, now... onto the commenter lists, where a king has been deposed.

2016 Top Commenters, by comment volume:

1. That One Guy: 2306 comments
2. Ninja: 1577 comments
3. nasch: 1299 comments
4. John Fenderson: 1275 comments
5. PaulT: 1271 comments
6. Uriel-238: 1081 comments
7. DannyB: 1024 comments
8. Whatever: 882 comments
9. Padpaw: 845 comments
10. That Anonymous Coward: 825 comments

The deposed king would be John Fenderson, who led the list of most prolific commenters for four years running until this year. John -- who has always been a wonderful contributor here at Techdirt -- stopped commenting back in August. I hope everything's okay, John. That lets That One Guy finally jump into the top slot, after coming in second for a few years. PaulT maintains his position as making the top 10 list every year we've kept track, and nasch continues his streak of making it every single year... except one. The newcomer to the list this year is Padpaw. Nicely done. Also, That Anonymous Coward returns (barely) to the top 10 after missing it in 2015.

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:
Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the lightbulb

1. That One Guy: 355 comments (15%)
2. PaulT: 115 comments (9%)
3. That Anonymous Coward: 110 comments (13%)
4. Mason Wheeler: 87 comments (16%)
5. Ninja: 84 comments (5%)
6. John Fenderson: 67 comments (5%)
7. DannyB: 66 comments (6%)
8. Uriel-238: 64 comments (6%)
9. Roger Strong: 52 comments (8%)
10. Mike Masnick: 29 comments (6%)

I think that's the first time I made this list, actually. Neat. Last year, That One Guy also led this list with 356 insightful comments. He's apparently slipping with just 355 this year. Slacker.

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon:
Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the LOL icon

1. TechDescartes: 46 comments (26%)
2. That One Guy: 38 comments (2%)
3. Roger Strong: 30 comments (5%)
4. DannyB: 29 comments (3%)
5. Mason Wheeler: 24 comments (4%)
6. Ninja: 22 comments (1%)
7. That Anonymous Coward: 17 comments (2%)
8. TheResidentSkeptic: 11 comments (11%)
9. AricTheRed: 9 comments (17%)
10. Vidiot: 9 comments (7%)

Once again, we see that it's a lot harder to get enough people to think you're funny than insightful. Except for that TechDescartes guy. Last year, we noted that he showed up at the end of the year, but still was able to jump onto the top funniest list with a bunch of funny comments, and with a full year under his belt, that let him jump to the top of the list, and with an astounding 26% hit rate. AricTheRed and TheResidentSkeptic buck the trend with decently high funny percentages as well. Nicely done everyone.

And, with that, we've closed the door on 2016... and on to 2017. We'll be back tomorrow with regular posting.

Filed Under: numbers, stats, techdirt

Let These Picturesque Stock Models Explain Techdirt Gear To You

from the listen-up dept

Have you hit up our super-early holiday gear sale yet? Because you've only got until Monday, and then it's all going away for the rest of the year! Of course, there has been some debate about what exactly our designs mean. Since Teespring lets us superimpose our gear onto a parade of photogenic models, I figure we'll let force them to do the talking, with speech bubbles! So if you're confused, prepare to be enlightened:

Nerd Harder is available on T-shirts, hoodies, mugs and stickers »

Takedown is available on T-shirts and hoodies »

Home Cooking Is Killing Restaurants is available on T-shirts, mugs and stickers »

Math Is Not A Crime is available on T-shirts, hoodies, mugs and stickers »

Vote2016() is available on T-shirts, hoodies and stickers »

The sale ends on Monday! Hurry up and order your gear today! »

Filed Under: nerd harder, t-shirts, takedown, techdirt, vote

Reminder: Sign Up For Private Internet Access, Support Techdirt & Get Sneak Peeks At Our Upcoming Articles

from the don't-miss-out dept

Sign up for VPN service now and get a free year's subscription to the Crystal Ball »

Hey folks -- as a reminder, we've partnered up with Private Internet Access, one of the best VPNs out there (I use it), to offer a special deal to Techdirt readers who are looking for a VPN. If you sign up via this special link, you'll (1) get a great VPN service, (2) support Techdirt, and (3) get a free one-year subscription (normally $15) to the Techdirt Crystal Ball, which gives you early access to posts before they're officially live on the site. When you sign up, you'll get a coupon sent to you that you can then use in our Insider Shop for a free Crystal Ball subscription (along with some First Word/Last Word credits that you can use to promote certain comments). And, you'll get a Techdirt Insider badge on your profile to let folks know that you support Techdirt (which we really, really appreciate). Check it out now.

Filed Under: crystall ball, techdirt
Companies: private internet access

Now You Can Nerd Even Harder With Hoodies, Mugs & Stickers

from the the-super-early-holiday-sale dept

Nerd Harder is now available on hoodies, mugs & stickers »

Though several of our Teespring offerings have been hits, none have quite matched the popularity of the original: Nerd Harder. But that was before we started experimenting with products beyond mere t-shirts, and so as part of our super-early holiday gear sale we've added options for hoodies for $35, mugs for $14 and stickers for $4 in black, gray and navy blue. So even if you already snagged a t-shirt the last time, it might be time to nerd even harder with some new gear. If you didn't — well, t-shirts are still available too.

(And don't forget to check out our new Math Is Not A Crime gear, plus the other returning designs in our holiday sale!)

Filed Under: nerd harder, techdirt

Two Great Ways To Support Techdirt

from the cwf+rtb dept

Happy long weekend, Techdirters! We've got two big offers on the go — one that, like the summertime, is coming to an end, and one that just got started. As long-time readers know, we have a philosophy here called CwF+RtB: we connect with fans and then try to give them a reason to buy, and we owe a big thanks to all the fans who keep proving that it's a damn good philosophy indeed. We've actually been experimenting with some expansions to our traditional on-site advertising recently, but we've never much liked that world (thus our failure to follow most of the media's lead in getting angry about ad blockers, instead offering the ability to turn off ads on Techdirt if you so choose) and, unsurprisingly, we ran into plenty of problems right away: deceptive and clickbait-ish ads, technical problems that interfered with the site for some people, and the fact that both we and our readers have the well-trained ad-blindness of any internet native. So we quickly shut down those new programs, because we'd much rather focus on direct offers like these that give our readers a chance to support Techdirt and get something good in return.

First, I'm sure you've seen our latest line of t-shirts, hoodies and other gear: Copying Is Not Theft. It's the one that's been riling people up way more than we expected on Twitter and our Facebook page. Their ire over the message is matched only by the desire to buy the gear that said ire seems to inspire in others — which is a fancy way of saying that a lot of you snatched up a t-shirt after realizing just how controversial it was.

But, if you haven't gotten yours yet, time is running out! The Copying Is Not Theft campaign closes on Monday at 8:00pm PDT, and we won't be taking reservations after it ends (the shirt will come back some day, but we aren't setting a date and it might be a while). So hurry up and place your order before it's too late!

Next, we've got a brand new deal for Techdirt readers. I probably don't need to tell anyone reading this how important a VPN is if you're concerned about your privacy and security online, and that's why we've teamed up with Private Internet Access (one of the most popular and highest rated VPN providers out there) to offer a one-year subscription to the Techdirt Crystal Ball for free when you sign up for a VPN account.

The Techdirt Crystal Ball is a special members-only feature that lets you read, share and comment on upcoming Techdirt posts before they go public on the front page of the blog, giving you a glimpse into our internal editorial queue and letting you get the jump on the conversation:

Normally Crystal Ball access costs $15/year via our Insider Shop, but you can get a full year for free: just use our special affiliate link to sign up with Private Internet Access. We won't auto-renew the Crystal Ball subscription or force you to cancel to avoid being charged — after the year is up, it will expire automatically.

Once again, happy long weekend everyone! Thanks for checking out these offers and helping us grow our CwF+RtB philosophy instead of tangling with crappy ad networks. All the profit from these and everything we sell goes to supporting (and expanding!) our ongoing reporting — we couldn't do it without you.

Filed Under: copying is not theft, deals, gear, t-shirt, techdirt, vpn

Announcing The Techdirt Greenhouse Salon: The Battle For Copyright Reform

from the join-us dept

Several years ago, we hosted a series of really fun events called the Techdirt Greenhouse, which involved getting a lot of smart people together and actively brainstorming on a variety of topics. We’ve been wanting to bring back the Greenhouse events for a while now, and we’re finally going to do so with a new series of evening "Greenhouse Salons” hosted by our Copia Institute. Today we're announcing the very first of these new Greenhouse Salons, The Battle For Copyright Reform. As you know, there are ongoing efforts to reform copyright around the globe, with a proposal leaked for the EU and one expected shortly in the US.

We're more than a bit concerned about the direction copyright reform may be moving in, especially after the leaked European draft, and thus this Greenhouse Salon will be a gathering to not just discuss issues related to copyright reform, but to actively strategize on how best to both respond to the efforts that are currently underway, and take a much more long-term view on how to really reform copyright in a much more useful way -- one that isn't anti-public and anti-innovation, but which recognizes that there are ways to build policies that align the interests of content creators, the public and innovators together. The event, in partnership with Automattic (creators of Wordpress) and sponsored by Pinterest, will be held on September 12th at 6pm in San Francisco. It's what we consider a working event, where everyone will be expected to participate in discussion groups. The event is invite only (and we've already invited a bunch of great people to take part), but we're now opening it up for others to request an invite as well. We'll do our best to accommodate requests for invites, while maintaining our goal of keeping the overall attendance at a manageable number to ensure that the group can actually function and accomplish things, and to involve people who have something productive to contribute to the overall discussion.

If you're interested, please fill out the form to request an invite. We'll be having more Greenhouse Salons on other topics (and probably in other locations) in future months, so stay tuned...

Filed Under: copyright, copyright reform, greenhouse, greenhouse salon, techdirt