Thiel Vs. Gawker

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

5 minutes ago, Yagathai said:

So you think it's OK that a billionaire gets to dictate what stories a free press decides to report?

Seems like a bit of a red herring. Thiel didn't decide anything. A jury decided that Gawker stepped over the line and violated the law and held them responsible. Exactly how the system is supposed to work. 

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

How do you prevent this? Don't people pay other people's lawsuits? Say goodbye to the ACLU then.

[Martell Spy]

 

 

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How do you prevent this? Don't people pay other people's lawsuits? Say goodbye to the ACLU then.

 

 

 

 

Yeah, this was discussed earlier in the thread. That's exactly why I'm not calling for immediate reform. It would likely have unintended consequences. It's more that I think Thiel deserves to be denounced and identified as a powerful person that uses his power recklessly. Although reform could become necessary if this became a common thing billionaires did.

I guess it comes down to how vile you think Gawker was and how much it needed to be removed from existence. It's important to note that Gawker readers ARE the public. So how could it possibly be public service to prevent them from reading Gawker by removing it? That is, unless you think these people were vile for reading Gawker and deserved this. Gawker wouldn't exist in the first place if people were not reading it.

[Martell Spy]

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Seems like a bit of a red herring. Thiel didn't decide anything. A jury decided that Gawker stepped over the line and violated the law and held them responsible. Exactly how the system is supposed to work. 

 

There's just a lot of unknowns because of how this played out. We don't know how much Thiel's involvement caused the demise of Gawker. (If it's truly gone, which isn't settled yet) We don't know what would have happened with Thiel's other lawsuits he was funding. We don't know if Thiel would have kept finding other lawsuits, or stopped at the few he was funding. I do think we know enough about his involvement however to say this sucks and Thiel sucks. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

18 hours ago, Yagathai said:

So you think it's OK that a billionaire gets to dictate what stories a free press decides to report?

You are asking the wrong question. 

A better question would be: Why do you need a billionaire to make that law suit happening?

Because his warchest is big enough to go the distance against gawker.

Why do you need 10 mil.+ US $ to make a case against gawker?

Does that mean you can only get justice in the US if you have the financial resources?

Those are way better questions to ask.

[Yagathai]

I mean they're way better for you, in that by asking them you distract us from the very real matter at hand -- a billionaire ruining his enemies in the press via legal but unethical means -- in order to derail the conversation into a meretricious rant against the flaws and merits of the US justice system in general.

I ain't biting.

[Martell Spy]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/17/my-gay-war-with-peter-thiel-gawker-s-nick-denton-faces-the-future.html

My Gay War With Peter Thiel: Gawker’s Nick Denton Faces the Future
Gawker’s Nick Denton doesn’t know if he is about to be destroyed by Hulk Hogan, or saved by Ziff Davis. But all his woes, he says, are sourced in his and Peter Thiel’s gay ideological differences.

 

 

We need to get Thomas Pynchon to write this up as a novel.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

18 hours ago, Yagathai said:

I mean they're way better for you, in that by asking them you distract us from the very real matter at hand -- a billionaire ruining his enemies in the press via legal but unethical means -- in order to derail the conversation into a meretricious rant against the flaws and merits of the US justice system in general.

I ain't biting.

No, you keep tilting your billionaire straw man setting up a secondary court system to force all the press to write what he wants. have fun dong that. I am out.

[Ran]

There's simply no "reform" possible for this. You either stop all outside funding -- thereby handing even more power to wealth (corporate or private) -- or you allow it.

Frankly, a wealthy individual taking an interest in a case and offering support doesn't really worry me. In fact, nothing says that some other wealthy individual might decide to balance the scale -- whose to say a George Soros might not jump in to fund a vigorous defense against a Peter Thiel? -- and certainly we have plenty of grassroots and non-profit efforts pretty much every day trying to raise funds to help people in legal need.

Here's the places where there are genuine worries:

1) Disclosure. I don't think it's wrong for Peter Thiel to support the case against Gawker. I do think that it should be the case that it is in the public interest to know who is paying the lawyers in a case.

2) For-profit "investment", aka champerty. This is something in the common law that's still around, and basically the idea is that when people could fund litigation and agree to split the "profit", this led to many cases of "meritless" litigation where people figured they could squeeze someone else into a settlement and thereby make a profit. This has weakened a lot in the U.S., and there are now investment funds that exist solely to find legal cases to fund in return for a percentage of the return.

The only reform that could deal with the "problem" of something like this case is to put an absolute limit on expenditure in court cases. No bloody way that will happen.

 

 

[Martell Spy]

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Frankly, a wealthy individual taking an interest in a case and offering support doesn't really worry me. In fact, nothing says that some other wealthy individual might decide to balance the scale -- whose to say a George Soros might not jump in to fund a vigorous defense against a Peter Thiel? -- and certainly we have plenty of grassroots and non-profit efforts pretty much every day trying to raise funds to help people in legal need.

Here's the places where there are genuine worries:

1) Disclosure. I don't think it's wrong for Peter Thiel to support the case against Gawker. I do think that it should be the case that it is in the public interest to know who is paying the lawyers in a case.

 

 

Yeah, I strongly agree with disclosure. Public opinion plays a very important role in protecting free speech. Part of Gawker's problem is some of their mistakes have turned a chunk of the public against them, including that jury and judge. However, there have been a number of people, famous and not famous, that have condemned Thiel. And it's hard to condemn someone in the first place if they are secretly funding lawsuits.