Guess that new fund set up to fight claims against content using fair use is immoral then, too.
Your rule would pretty much mean that only people who could afford things on their own can sue or fight a suit. No raising money from elsewhere.
Your rule would make the rich more powerful.
For goodness sake, Hogan won on the merits of the case, in a way pretty much everyone said it would. Gawker has no leg to stand on. Who funded his suit is completely irrelevant.
I vote with my wallet every day. This dude has a bigger wallet, that’s all.
Peter Thiel’s wealth, in and of itself, disturbs me – I’m not comfortable with a politically active billionaire class.
That said, Gawker had it coming. Liberty has limits, and it has to be used responsibly. The more liberty gets flaunted for its own sake, the less valuable that liberty becomes. If liberty is used without purpose, then it becomes privilege. Privileges can be taken away.
How is he influencing the outcome? Surely the case still stands or falls on its own merits regardless of who is paying the costs?
While I think the world would be a better place without the ACLU, the SPLC and their ilk, I don’t see how preventing people from helping other people in court would be workable or at all fair.
Ultimately the problem is nuisance lawsuits and the ability to grind people down with the threat of a lawsuit. Making it harder for people to get funding for lawyers would make things worse. There was recently a case where a bunch of patent trolls sued Adam Carolla for infringing on their patent of arranging internet media in a list format. He was able to fight them off by raising money from other people. Without that help he would have had to settle and they could have kept suing people and committing a type of legalized extortion.
The solution is to make it much easier to label a suit frivolous and have the plantiff’s pay for the lawyers fees of the accused. If people have to pay a price for abusing our legal system they will do so less frequently.
In this case what Gawker did to Thiel was wrong. What they did to Hogan was indefensible. I am not someone who cares so much about privacy that I care what advertisers know about me or whether they government overhears my cell phone calls, but the idea that someone could publish a sex video without the permission of the people involved and do so without repercussions is horrifying.
People who file nuisance lawsuits need to be stopped. This was not a nuisance suit and Thiel is the hero of this story.
All I know about this case is what I’ve read in this thread, but it seems to me:
Hulk Hogan sued Gawker over a complaint that, on the surface, seems like a pretty egregious invasion of his privacy, and a jury agreed that Gawker was way, waaaaay out of line in that. So, the lawsuit obviously had merit.
A very rich person helped finance the lawsuit for personal reasons.
The OP seems fixated on #2 (or rather, the OP probably holds hypocrisy as Thiel’s worst crime, which is never a very solid criticism to base a debate on), while I’m more focused on #1. Whether or not the lawsuit has merit is the key question. If this was simply a lawsuit intended to harass and force the “journalists” to expend money to defend themselves against ridiculous charges, then I’m not in favor of those kinds of lawsuits in any case.
It seems based on the information presented so far that Peter Thiel held his fire until he found a case that was worthy of pursuing. That seems quite ethical to me.
Is this a joke? The legal system does not work that way.
Given that Thiel’s involvement in the case was secret until very recently, we don’t really know if he funded other cases with less meritorious claims. And probably won’t.
My statement was badly worded and speculative, so let me comment only on what we know. Secretly funding lawsuits against your enemies to satisfy a personal vendetta is troubling behavior. In this case I think his actions helped bring about justice, but his motives and methods give me pause.
What sort of answer is that?
How did the extra money change the “facts” of the case? Did he pay people to lie in court? Did he lobby to have laws changed so that different judgements could be given? Did his money fabricate statements from the Gawker staf out of thin air?
Clearly his money made it easier for Hogan to bring the case in the first place, but how did it change the facts of what Gawker or Hogan actually did?
Government court monopoly results in unjust outcomes. Must be market fundementalism. Unbelievable distortion of reality.
Erosion of social norms is a consequence of the growth of the state and the substitution of forced arrangements for peaceful cooperation among individuals, but I don’t think you want to go there.
I won’t argue that better, high-paid lawyers make far better cases, but are you saying that the main reason that Hulk Hogan won his case is because he had lots of money for legal fees? From my passing understanding of the facts, it seems pretty damn clear that Gawker did something really, really wrong to him.
That’s a fair point. But that doesn’t change the fact that he backed a meritorious case. Whether he backed others with less merit, as you point out, is something that ought to be considered unproven either way.
Do you generally believe that meritorious actions are only meritorious if the intentions were pure?
Right. We should have corporations establish for-profit courts so that justice can really be meted out without concern for money.
Uh, wait a minute…
I don’t see the issue with someone funding someone else’s legal case. Every time a lawyer takes a case on contingency he’s doing exactly that.
There is a possibility that a rich guy could theoretically fund baseless cases in order to harass poorer people he doesn’t like by forcing them to defend themselves perpetually in court. This sort of happens already when the government is out to get someone - the government has unlimited resources and a middle-class guy on the other end can bankrupt himself even if he wins the case. (And it’s somewhat similar to class-action lawyers going after big corporations to get nuisance payoffs - effectively these amount to legal blackmail.)
IMHO the correct answer to these issues would be to lower the threshold for forcing the losing side to pay the winner’s court costs, which would deter this type of thing. Not perfectly, of course, but worthwhile on balance.
Surely the problem is that Hogan couldn’t vindicate his right to privacy unless he found a friendly billionaire to fund his apparently wholly meritorious action? The problem is not that Thiel funded his action, but that he needed Thiel to fund his action.
Exactly. But instead of the government, imagine that it’s just a really rich guy with an axe to grind. Can’t fire him, can’t cut his budget, can’t vote him out of office, can’t file a FOIA on him.
Your rich neighbor can toss a banana peel on your driveway, slip on it, sue you, and bankrupt you in legal fees before you can prove it’s bullshit. People plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, just because they can’t afford bail and they want to get out of jail as quickly as possible. This is the world we live in, and most of us are lucky it hasn’t turned on us yet.
You should be both glad that Gawker’s going down and worried that billionaires can do this. Since no laws were broken by Thiel, this was bound to happen. We simply have to trust that such billionaires are not vindictive enough to do this all the time for bad reasons.
I didn’t suggest that here.
The idea that capitalism is to blame for a government service monopoly is a common rhetorical trick. We see the same type of garbage from people who blame wars on capitalism.
Private arbitration exists. It’s a real world thing. Is Theil using the private sector to make war on Gawker, no he has chosen to wield the implement of state. He is doing the exact thing that libertarians have warned about for decades. Libertarians have always talked about how the existence of the machinery of state violence makes it possible for things that would be impossible in a free market.
Libertarians are not anarchists. The use of the government to punish people who are violating the rights of others is not what libertarians have warned about for decades, it is the primary purpose of the government according to libertarian ethics.
If you and I have a dispute, we could resolve in in private arbitration if we both agree we want an arbitrator. If I tell you to pound sand and I don’t want arbitration, you would not be perpetrating state violence on me to file a lawsuit in a real court where I am compelled to respond to your complaint.
ETA: plus, if courts can be swayed by fancy lawyers being paid millions of bucks to push a case, I’m pretty certain that there’s no free market shield of freedom that makes arbitrators immune to the powers of slick-talking lawyers.
I used to have a higher opinion of Thiel. I always assumed he was “more” libertarian and maybe I assumed more pro-First Amend, more principled, and definitely wouldn’t support Trump.
You’re a smart guy, Larry. I’m sure you can see some potential unfortunate consequences if organizations like Gawker are allowed to print lies and bullshit while running rampant as an unchecked power in society while pretending that
their Pathos, their Malice, and their wake of destruction is Humor or Journalism, right?
Moves Stick-Shift out of Condescension and into First.
Gawker survived by betting that nobody they’d smear or slander could ever spend enough to bring them to court. Their Slap-Down was well earned.
You are 100% right, but there is good money in slander and harassing people for lies, half truths, and telephoto shots from trees pretending to show where some people put their smelly-bits.
Is it time for that to change? [del]Precedent[/del] Og only knows…
I’m willing to assume that he did not change laws or facts or bribe witnesses or any of that.
In the first part of your last quoted sentence here, I think you’re agreeing with me. Making it easier to bring a legal case is influencing the outcome, since the outcome of a legal dispute includes both whether a case is brought at all and the legal costs to both parties, regardless of the way it is decided.
But your comment wasn’t just about this case, it was in response to a comment about Thiel supporting cases in general. Do you dispute that having more money makes you more likely to prevail in a legal dispute? Because that’s what “How is he influencing the outcome?” implies.
We can also examine the question from the other side. Peter Thiel, an intelligent, powerful, and financially savvy billionaire, donated money to the legal cause of Hulk Hogan, a millionaire certainly capable of hiring competent lawyers on his own to sue Gawker. Do you think he did so with the belief that his donation would not affect the outcome of the case?
I believe that intentions matter. Funding a meritorious legal case because it is brought against a party that you wish to see brought down is morally distinct from funding a meritorious legal case in which you have no vested interest.
On the other hand, it’s quite possible that Thiel heard about what happened to Hogan and empathized with him for having had his privacy similarly violated. If so, though, it seems the honorable thing to do there would be to publicly support his case, not attempt to fund it in secret.
As I said at the beginning, I’m conflicted.