Now Twitter's 'Report' Function Being Used To Disappear Complaint About GDPR Being Used To Disappear Public Court Document

from the so-that's-great dept

Just recently we wrote about how a guy in France, Michael Francois Bujaldon, who had been sued in the US and accused of securities and real estate fraud, had apparently been using the GDPR's right to be forgotten features to get the court docket about this lawsuit deleted from the web (in at least one case) or have his name removed from it (in the other). Our story focused on the situation with the website PlainSite, which is run by Aaron Greenspan and hosts tons of public court dockets. In our comments, it was interesting to note that at least one person seemed hellbent on trashing Greenspan. Greenspan and I have had our own differences throughout the years, and he has been a vocal critic of the way I've covered him in the past, but these comments seemed to go way over the line.

And now, Greenspan informs me that someone is trying to get his original tweet -- which alerted me to this abuse of the GDPR to delete public documents -- disappeared from the internet as well. On Wednesday morning Greenspan discovered that both his PlainSite Twitter account and his personal Twitter account were "limited" due to reports. It's unclear why his personal account was limited, but Twitter told him that his original tweet about Bujaldon violated its rules on "posting personal information."

It is difficult to see how a tweet that simply reads "French scam artist Michael Francois Bujaldon is using the GDPR to attempt to remove traces of his United States District Court case from the internet. He has already succeeded in compelling PacerMonitor to remove his case. We have 24 hours to respond" (and then links to the PlainSite docket) could possibly violate any Twitter rules, but the company told him he needed to delete the tweet in question:

Once again, we're in a situation where if you hand people tools to delete content they dislike -- whether it's a DMCA takedown process, a GDPR "right to be forgotten" or a private platform's "report abuse" button -- some percentage of people are going to abuse that. And, as we've discussed many times, with the private platform decision making process involving overworked, underpaid workers who have to make determinations on each "report" with about 5 seconds to consider the report, many, many mistakes are going to be made. This is yet another one, and is yet another example of why we should be careful about giving people even more tools for deleting content.

Filed Under: aaron greenspan, content moderation, dockets, erasing history, gdpr, michael francois bujaldon, public information, right to be forgotten, rtbf
Companies: plainsite, twitter

PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time To Fix PACER

from the down-the-memory-hole dept

For years, we've talked about the many problems with PACER, the horribly designed and managed electronic court records system that the federal court system uses here in the US. Beyond being clunky, buggy, horribly designed and slow -- it's also expensive. With some exceptions, it's 10 cents per page you download, and also 10 cents per search. As many have noted, this almost certainly violates the law concerning PACER, which says that the Judicial Conference can only "prescribe reasonable fees… to reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services." And yet the fees go way, way beyond what's needed to maintain the (again, horrible) system which they refuse to update. Instead, it's used for lots of other things. And, as many people note, it's something of a travesty that all of these public records are locked up, rather than being made available. Even more ridiculous is that when people hack around this system, such as with the open RECAP project to free up PACER documents, courts freak out. Or, when people like Aaron Swartz try to use free access to PACER to free up its documents, they end up being the subject of an FBI investigation for computer hacking.

Aaron Greenspan, who runs an open court records site called Plainsite (and who is currently engaged in an unlikely-to-succeed lawsuit arguing that PACER should be free), has noticed that PACER is also shoving old cases down the memory hole so they will no longer be available. In a brief announcement on August 10th, PACER's website announced that a bunch of cases would "no longer be available." Now, there have always been some cases not on PACER, but to actively start removing a bunch of cases, including many that are fairly recent (CAFC cases from just two years ago?!?) seems ridiculous and excessive. Yes, PACER is horribly designed and managed, but it's not like the storage costs for some old PDFs is that high. Especially as storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. Does someone down at the Administrative Office of the US Courts want me to send them an external 2 TB hard drive? They run about $100 these days...

Filed Under: aaron greenspan, cases, pacer, public records, records
Companies: plainsite

The Insanely Complex Rules The Supreme Court Requires You To Meet To Ask It To Hear Your Case

from the what's-the-point dept

We recently talked about Aaron Greenspan for his efforts to continue some of the efforts that Aaron Swartz began -- freeing up information to legal documents, in particular. However, back in 2007, we also wrote about Greenspan for being yet another Harvard person claiming that he really invented Facebook, and that Zuckerberg copied from him. We thought those claims were kind of silly. Greenspan did eventually settle with Facebook on a trademark claim (after Greenspan tried to get Facebook's marks cancelled), though last year he tried to claim he had new evidence of copying by Zuckerberg, which all seems fairly silly. As we've noted time and time again, ideas mean little. It's all about the execution. Facebook executed in a way people wanted. Get over it.

That wasn't Greenspan's only long shot legal dispute. He also sued author Ben Mezrich, Mezrich's publisher Random House, and Columbia Pictures, claiming that they all more or less rewrote his own book. Mezrich's book, Accidental Billionaires, became the hit movie The Social Network, and Greenspan claims they both infringe on his own book, which he had trouble publishing, about the origins of Facebook. Greenspan is representing himself (pro se) and hasn't had much luck. The case was easily dismissed by both the district court and the appeals court. The district court reminded Greenspan that you can't copyright facts. I tend to think that Greenspan's legal escapades concerning these things are simply tilting at windmills. There's no case here and he should really move on.

That said, there is a really fascinating tangent to all of this. After the appeals court once again rejected Greenspan's arguments, he went through the process of filing to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case (the chances of this actually happening are very, very, very slim). However, his blog post about his reasons for filing and the insane process that the Supreme Court makes you go through is absolutely worth reading. Basically, he notes that every step of the way there are bizarre, convoluted and ridiculous rules that seem to serve no purpose other than to try to make it frustrating as hell for a normal everyday person to actually appeal to the Supreme Court without hiring an expensive lawyer and/or some really expensive services. Here's just a snippet of a much longer piece, which I highly recommend, despite my feeling that his lawsuits are a complete waste of time.

The first thing to know is that the finished booklet must be 6 and 1/8th inches wide and 9 and 1/4 inches high.

9 and 1/4 inches is a strange number when it comes to page length. Most of us know paper (so long as we're not in Europe or Asia) as being 8 and 1/2 inches wide by 11 inches high, commonly referred to as "Letter" size paper. If you take a standard sheet of Letter paper and fold it over, you get a booklet that is 5 and 1/2 inches by 8 and 1/2 inches. For the Supreme Court's purposes, that for whatever reason doesn't work. (Interestingly, the dimensions of the printed text block easily fit on a Letter sheet of paper, so Rule 33.1 could be said to be designed to mandate slightly bigger margins, and nothing more.)

Well—you might think (as I did)—maybe they sell 12 and 1/4 inch by 9 and 1/4 inch paper in stores (so that when you fold it over lengthwise you get a booklet that matches the Court's required dimensions).

They most certainly do not sell 12 and 1/4 inch by 9 and 1/4 inch paper in stores. It's one of the only things, in fact, that I've ever typed into Google and not found a single relevant result for. However we farm trees to make paper, we do not farm them to make paper of this size. It does not exist in the marketplace.

He goes on to note that the Supreme Court even specifies the weight of the paper, but not the type (which makes a difference in understanding the weight), leading to confusion. Oh yeah, also the filings are encouraged by the Court to be bound together with a specific stitch: saddle stitch. The whole thing is a crazy story -- and while I think this legal filing itself is a waste of time, I really appreciate his sharing the details of some of the insanity it takes to actually file.

Yes, we don't want random crackpots continually inundating the Supreme Court, but it really seems like these archaic rules now serve little purpose other than to make things nearly impossible for anyone who doesn't do exactly this for a living to take part in the process. Basically, it's just like other sets of regulations whose sole purpose really seems to be to prop up a mini industry that has sprung up around them. In this day and age, it seems only reasonable that the rules should be modernized quite a bit.

Filed Under: aaron greenspan, lawsuits, rules, supreme court
Companies: facebook

Can Crowdsourcing Complete The Job Aaron Swartz Started In Freeing PACER?

from the would-be-nice dept

We've talked about the importance of carrying on the work that Aaron Swartz began, and the global efforts at hackathons to do just that. However, a few have started working on very specific proposals to try to carry on some of Aaron's work. Specifically, they're trying to build on the effort over which he was first investigated by the feds: his attempts to free up public domain court documents that are locked up behind PACER's paywall.

For the uninitiated, despite being public domain, court filings are locked up in an incredibly antiquated electronic document system that the federal courts all use called PACER. Anyone can get access to PACER (though using the system, which has never been an example of modernity, takes some figuring out), but it costs $0.10 per page to download any documents. That's what Aaron was trying to "free."

While his initial effort, making use of a "trial" at certain libraries allowing free access to PACER was shut down, his downloads did become the crux of the RECAP project, a browser plugin built a few years ago by some Princeton students, which would automatically upload any document you accessed via PACER to the Internet Archive where they could be viewed for free going forward.

Unfortunately, RECAP itself more or less stagnated after many of those behind it left Princeton. However, following Aaron's death, there have been a couple of interesting developments, driven in large part by a different Aaron, Aaron Greenspan. First, he set up three grants of $5,000 each to update the RECAP extension. It's currently only available in Firefox, but there are grants for expanding it to Chrome and to IE, while also updating the Firefox browser to cover appeals court documents. This would be huge. I tend to use PACER via Chrome, so I've been unable to contribute much to RECAP lately.

But the second part of the plan, also put in place by Greenspan, is what he's calling Operation Asymptote, to try to get lots of people to help out in freeing PACER documents. He's using the one slight exception to the $0.10 per page rule: PACER does not charge you if your total charges add up to less than $15 per calendar quarter. In other words, you can basically download 150 "pages" during a quarter for free. Now, that's not really 150 pages of court documents, since PACER also charges for searches. And, since some court documents can be pretty long, 150 pages can actually go pretty fast. But Greenspan is suggesting that if we can get a lot of people to sign up for PACER (and RECAP) and download a small amount, keeping under the $15 line, then effectively, a large group of people might free large parts of the public domain material in PACER for free (you need to have a valid credit card to sign up, but if you keep under the $15, then you don't get charged).

This is being done in association with Greenspan's PlainSite, a site which tries to make legal information as public as possible (we've linked to them in the past for their research into Intellectual Ventures' shell companies). Part of the goal is to actually pull together the details of cases worked on by "every US Attorney or Assistant US Attorney" during their career. For example, you could look at cases involving Stephen Heymann or those involving Carmen Ortiz. On the Operation Asymptote page, they even have a link that will automatically point you to cases where they're missing documents, so it's one click easy.

I have no idea if enough people will actually participate to make a difference, but after the slight hassle of signing up for a PACER account (and then a chance to witness just how poorly designed PACER is) anyone can help out for free. It seems like a worthwhile goal.

Filed Under: aaron greenspan, aaron swartz, crowdsourcing, pacer, recap

Another Failed Harvard Social Network Takes 'Legal Action' Against Facebook

from the if-connectu-could-do-it... dept

Even before ConnectU came along claiming that Mark Zuckerberg somehow "stole" the idea and the code for Facebook from them, there was another Harvard alum, Aaron Greenspan, who had been claiming something similar about how Zuckerberg took the idea from a project Greenspan set up called houseSYSTEM. When Greenspan's story (after years of him pushing it) finally got some mainstream press last year, we pointed out how ridiculous the whole story was. Facebook was hardly the first social network out there -- and ConnectU and houseSYSTEM were clearly built off the ideas of those that had come before them as well. It seemed like both cases involved folks who had failed to actually execute and build something that people liked, and were taking it out on Zuckerberg (who did successfully build something that people wanted to use) in hopes of either fame or money or both.

Of course, once Facebook settled the case with ConnectU earlier this month, it was only a matter of time until Greenspan realized that he might be missing out as well. So, as you might expect, Greenspan has decided to "take legal action" against Facebook, though at this point it's merely limited to trying to get Facebook's trademark on the name revoked (claiming that houseSYSTEM used the name, and that it's widely used and generic). He may actually be right that the term is generic, but it seems more than likely that this lawsuit is just trying to drum up some attention and potentially money from Facebook.

It will come as no surprise, of course, that Greenspan is really using this lawsuit to promote his "book" which has a huge section accusing Zuckerberg of getting the idea from Greenspan. Greenspan's been promoting the book for ages, with plenty of excerpts available online. The press release Greenspan put out claims that his "publisher" (which is apparently also owned by Greenspan) was denied the ability to promote the book because it had "Facebook" in the title. Of course, he provides no details about who denied him the right to advertise, and it seems odd that anyone would prevent titles with the name "Facebook" from appearing, as such a book, by itself, probably is not a violation of Facebook's trademark. Does anyone else want to claim that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook? Apparently, it's good for business.

Filed Under: aaron greenspan, books, facebook, history, mark zuckerberg, trademark