Silent Puffin? wrote:
As for sending a warning to the industry, will it do any good when the parent company can simply move of shore somewhere safe for such rulings?

 Breotan wrote:

 Silent Puffin? wrote:
As for sending a warning to the industry, will it do any good when the parent company can simply move of shore somewhere safe for such rulings?

Isn't that illegal?

 LordofHats wrote:
Moving your corporate head quarters off shore isn't illegal, nor is it tax evasion. Fort a company that exists mostly on the internet, it's even easier because you can move all your key infrastructure, namely servers, offshore (which also isn't illegal. International suits involving someone in one country going after a company mostly based in another are a nightmare for innumerable reasons.

 Asherian Command wrote:
Well you are technically running from or a suite against your company which I think is akin to something like tax evasion. I just don't remember the exact term currently.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
Well you are technically running from or a suite against your company which I think is akin to something like tax evasion. I just don't remember the exact term currently.

But that wasn't the question. Obviously Gawker can't escape the financial penalty they've received simply by moving to another country, the suggestion was that other media companies might move to other countries with more favorable laws. And there's certainly no law that you can't move a company to a more desirable location.

 Asherian Command wrote:
... Kotaku ... Jezebel...

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
On the other hand, an amount so large as to bankrupt them isn't a "deterrent" either. At least, not to Gawker, since they won't exist anymore.

Since the sheer size of the damages were sufficient to all but certainly bankrupt the company should that kind of thing be done via a criminal court? Morally at least.

As for sending a warning to the industry, will it do any good when the parent company can simply move of shore somehere safe for such rulings?

 TheMeanDM wrote:
Even celebrities are entitled to the basic rights of privacy as any regular person.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
... Kotaku ... Jezebel...

And nothing of value was lost.

 EverlastingNewb wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
... Kotaku ... Jezebel...

And nothing of value was lost.

Jobs. Whether i agree with Gawker (i.e. Kotaku etc.) or not doesn't really matter, people losing their income isn't something i would celebrate. And i'm not speaking of the Freelance-Bloggers who think they're Journalists.
I speak of the random employee. I doubt that everybody, who's an employee at Gawker, subscribed to their shady tabloid journalism. For some it was probably just a job like any other job.

 Asherian Command wrote:

 EverlastingNewb wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
... Kotaku ... Jezebel...

And nothing of value was lost.

Jobs. Whether i agree with Gawker (i.e. Kotaku etc.) or not doesn't really matter, people losing their income isn't something i would celebrate. And i'm not speaking of the Freelance-Bloggers who think they're Journalists.
I speak of the random employee. I doubt that everybody, who's an employee at Gawker, subscribed to their shady tabloid journalism. For some it was probably just a job like any other job.

While true, the writers who worked were noted to be quite morally bankrupt.

Last week’s Gawker Media bankruptcy inspired online triumph. “What a beautiful day,” tweeted Hulk Hogan, whose $140-million invasion-of-privacy verdict — underwritten by hostile Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel — doomed Nick Denton’s snarky online empire. Most were less subtle. “Goodbye and good riddance to Gawker,” the New York Post sneered.

It’s tempting to side with the gloaters; I’m as disgusted by Gawker as the next guy, and I’m not above feeling a frisson of glee when bad people face consequences for their actions. But schadenfreude isn’t a 1st Amendment value. From a legal and constitutional perspective, even Gawker haters should be troubled by its fate.

Spite arose from partisan hostility to Gawker’s reliably left-of-center sensibilities. It was also a reaction to Gawker’s routine degradation of its targets, and to how sharply that behavior contrasts with Gawker’s progressive pieties. Gawker Media attacks anti-gay politicians and celebrates advances in gay rights. At the same time, its writers smugly and self-righteously out gay men. Recently, Gawker transmuted blackmail into clicks when it participated in a male escort’s extortion of a married executive from a rival media empire. Gawker also champions feminist values, particularly through its site Jezebel, even as it humiliates women for traffic. Gawker paid a young man to describe a sexual encounter with a candidate for U.S. Senate, including critique of her pubic hair, because Gawker didn’t like her politics. A reliable critic of objectifying women out of one side of its mouth, Gawker publishes hacked and leaked nudes out of the other. Gawker offers nihilistic hypocrisy as clickbait.

Observers were, then, rather skeptical that Gawker had principled journalistic reasons to publish Hulk Hogan’s sex tape. And the trial, far from rehabilitating Gawker’s reputation for professionalism or decency, soiled it further by dredging up unseemly episodes from the site’s past. “Blah, blah, blah,” a Gawker editor wrote in passing along a complaint from a young woman who was the subject of a stolen video, eagerly published for clicks, that may have depicted her rape.

So, yes, Gawker got what was coming in a karmic sense. Nevertheless, when a jury verdict bankrupts a media company for what it has published, we ought to examine meticulously whether the company received due process, whether the court applied the correct 1st Amendment principles, whether the verdict was based on mere antipathy rather than law and fact, and whether the damages are proportionate to the alleged wrongdoing. The 1st Amendment does not allow courts to craft new ad hoc exceptions to free-speech principles when speech is sufficiently upsetting. Rather, courts must carefully determine whether particular speech falls into well-defined exceptions to the 1st Amendment, such as obscenity or fraud.

Nor should we take for granted that the judge and jury decided the case wisely, because most of our cherished free-speech rights have been recognized by appellate courts after judges and juries erred. The right for high school students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the right to burn a flag, the right for Hustler magazine to satirize Jerry Falwell, the right for the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers without prior restraint, the requirement that public officials prove that journalists engaged in actual malice before winning a defamation case – all of these important rights arose from Supreme Court decisions correcting the mistakes of trial courts and juries.

In short, we shouldn’t just assume that crushing bad people is just or defensible. We don’t need the 1st Amendment to defend popular speech, we need it to protect unpopular speech; our civic obligations are at their peak precisely when loathsome people are on the line.

Devotion to the 1st Amendment should also provoke grave concerns about Thiel’s open-checkbook funding of Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. What Thiel did wasn’t illegal; he has free-speech rights too. The problem is that Thiel found a way to weaponize the brokenness of our legal system.

Though Thiel crushed Gawker through victory, he might well have crushed it in defeat. Defending a civil suit, whatever its merits, is often a years-long pitched battle. Eventual vindication rarely comes with reimbursement of fees and costs, let alone compensation for the disruption and stress. Most victories are Pyrrhic. Few factors deter vengeance by litigation; one is that litigation is impossibly expensive, even for plaintiffs. A billionaire’s support eliminates that barrier and allows angry people to silence speakers they hate.

That doesn’t mean we should stop the rich from funding causes they care about. It means that the cause of free speech requires us constantly to reevaluate our legal system and demand that the process of litigation itself cannot prove ruinous. Again, that’s true even when hated gossip-mongers are at the receiving end of that litigation. We owe this vigilance to ourselves — as the potential next targets — and to our free-speech heritage.

 feeder wrote:
Sharing the Hulkster's sex tape is protected speech how?

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
If its not ruinous, then its not much of a deterrent, is it?

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
If its not ruinous, then its not much of a deterrent, is it?

On the other hand why is a civil court intentionally bankrupting companies?

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
If its not ruinous, then its not much of a deterrent, is it? Gawker might have otherwise just shrugged it off as a cost of doing business or occupational hazard, and continued on violating peoples' privacy.

 whembly wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
If its not ruinous, then its not much of a deterrent, is it? Gawker might have otherwise just shrugged it off as a cost of doing business or occupational hazard, and continued on violating peoples' privacy.

I dunno... if you can estimate the yearly profit (plus any bonus' paid) and exact the penalty over a two year period w/o destroying the company...

That's punishment enough imo.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 whembly wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
If its not ruinous, then its not much of a deterrent, is it? Gawker might have otherwise just shrugged it off as a cost of doing business or occupational hazard, and continued on violating peoples' privacy.

I dunno... if you can estimate the yearly profit (plus any bonus' paid) and exact the penalty over a two year period w/o destroying the company...

That's punishment enough imo.

But is it enough to deter the Company from repeating said behaviour?

More to the point, is it enough to make a sufficient example of them to deter others from engaging in similar behaviour in future?

 whembly wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Sharing the Hulkster's sex tape is protected speech how?

That's not what the Op-ed was suggesting...

 Monkey Tamer wrote:
Another corporation will fill the vacuum. Give it a year and we'll have another news cesspool, probably ran by the same cretins.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:


Future Gawker wannabes will be much cautious in the content they put out.

Mario wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:


Future Gawker wannabes will be much cautious in the content they put out.

It's not about future Gawkers but about some billionaire not liking what you say (any publication has to be extra careful with what they print because somebody could dislike it, not just some gakky tabloid). What if some Chinese billionaire doesn't like what the New York Times writes and starts hounding them with lawsuits all the time. Thiel financed multiple lawsuits until he found one that got some traction, and the lawyer he used is still going after Gawker with another one (like this article mentions).