As an online phenomenon, JuicyCampus.com sounds more than a little familiar to those who followed the AutoAdmit/XOXOXTH controversy: message boards open to bathroom-graffiti anonymous posts about named fellow students. The difference this time is that the attorneys general of New Jersey and Connecticut have jumped in with legal action apparently premised on the unusual, and expansible, legal theory that the site violates consumer fraud statutes by not enforcing its own announced ground rules on posting, or at least principles that it “suggests” it will follow. (ABA Journal and again; Volokh).
Posts Tagged ‘online speech’
Craigslist housing ads
Althouse on AutoAdmit
Advice to ponder (Mar. 6):
George Harrison once sang: “You serve me and I’ll serve you/Swing your partners, all get screwed/Bring your lawyer and I’ll bring mine/Get together, and we could have a bad time.”
If you sue me, I’m going to do my best to figure out how I can sue you. You want to think about that dynamic before you sue somebody. …
The decision to file a lawsuit is a momentous one. Think hard and think many steps ahead before you bring the courts into your life. Don’t sue angry.
More on the new suit filed by Anthony Ciolli, who had been named as a defendant in the earlier suit: Above the Law. Earlier on AutoAdmit/Xoxohth: Jun. 15 and Oct. 29, 2007.
February 23 roundup
- Easterbrook: “One who misuses litigation to obtain money to which he is not entitled is hardly in a position to insist that the court now proceed to address his legitimate claims, if any there are…. Plaintiffs have behaved like a pack of weasels and can’t expect any part of their tale be believed.” [Ridge Chrysler v. Daimler Chrysler via Decision of the Day]
- Retail stores and their lawyers find sending scare letters with implausible threats of litigation against accused shoplifters mildly profitable. [WSJ]
- Kentucky exploring ways to reform mass-tort litigation in wake of fen-phen scandal. [Mass Tort Prof; Torts Prof; AP/Herald-Dispatch; earlier: Frank @ American]
- After Posner opinion, expert should be looking for other lines of work. [Kirkendall; Emerald Investments v. Allmerica Financial Life Insurance & Annuity]
- Judge reduces jury verdict in Premarin & Prempro case to “only” $58 million. And I still haven’t seen anyone explain why it makes sense for a judge to decide damages awards were “the result of passion and prejudice,” but uphold a liability finding from the same impassioned and prejudiced jury. Wyeth will appeal. [W$J via Burch; AP/Business Week]
- Judge lets lawyers get to private MySpace and Facebook postings. [OnPoint; also Feb. 19]
- Nanny staters’ implausible case for regulating salt. [Sara Wexler @ American; earlier: Nov. 2002]
- Doctor: usually it’s cheaper to pay than to go to court. [GNIF BrainBlogger]
- Trial lawyers in Colorado move to eviscerate non-economic damages cap in malpractice cases [Rocky Mountain News]
- Bonin: don’t regulate free speech on the Internet in the name of “campaign finance” [Philadelphia Inquirer]
- “Executives face greater risks—but investors are no safer.” [City Journal]
- Professors discuss adverse ripple effects from law school affirmative action without mentioning affirmative action. Paging Richard Sander. Note also the absence of “disparate impact” from the discussion. [PrawfsBlawg; Blackprof]
- ATL commenters debate my American piece on Edwards. [Above the Law]
Advice for bloggers
On how to stay out of court (Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, Feb. 1).
Sued for encouraging user-generated content
Suits by businesses over their competitors’ advertising are a staple for us, but this one has a somewhat new wrinkle:
Quiznos, the toasted-sandwich chain, [invited] the public to submit homemade commercials in a contest intended to attack a top rival, Subway. The contest rules made it clear that the videos should depict Quiznos sandwiches as “superior” to Subway’s.
Subway promptly sued Quiznos and iFilm, the Web site owned by Viacom that ran the contest, saying that many of the homemade videos made false claims and depicted its brand in a derogatory way. Subway is also objecting to ads that Quiznos itself created, showing people on the street choosing Quiznos over Subway.
The dispute over an ad is fairly standard — companies often sue one another over advertising claims — but the video contest raises a novel legal question: Quiznos did not make the insulting submissions, so should it be held liable for user-generated content created at its behest? …
If Subway wins, advertisers and media companies may find themselves liable for false advertising claims made by consumers who participate in their contests.
(Louise Story, “Can a Sandwich Be Slandered?”, New York Times, Jan. 29).
Update: Bring me the identity of Patent Troll Tracker
Call me a patent troll? See you in court
Watch what you say about lawyers, a continuing feature: the blog Troll Tracker has been critical of firms that make a practice of buying up patent rights to sue on them. Now co-founder Ray Niro of the Chicago plaintiffs firm Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro is threatening to sue Troll Tracker for alleged infringement of a patent on a technique sometimes used in web graphics, JPEG decompression. (If a website posts graphics at all, there is a good chance that it is in similar violation of this asserted patent.) Niro also wants the anonymous blawger’s identity unmasked and is offering a bounty toward that end. (TrollTracker, Dec. 4; John Bringardner, “A Bounty of $5,000 to Name Troll Tracker”, IP Law & Business, Dec. 4; via Ambrogi, who appends an extensive list of blogs commenting on the story).
Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation
Daniel Solove’s solution to the potential problem of damning information on the Internet is to open up the libel laws and to remove the Communications Decency Act safe-harbor for site owners. As Amber Taylor points out in a provocative review, one could take this chain more seriously if Solove more directly considered the real-world consequences of such a rule, and the amount of true speech it would shut down because of the potential legal expense of defending speech in the absence of bright-line rules. Eric Turkewitz’s review finds his blogger identity trumping his plaintiffs’ attorney identity to also oppose the expanded litigation that Solove proposes. David Giacalone is more favorable, though also unwilling to endorse Solove’s policy prescriptions.
Defamation-suit roundup
A hearing officer has recommended a reprimand for Boston judge and libel-suit winner Ernest B. Murphy over those “fascinatingly repellent” letters he sent to the publisher of the Boston Herald demanding a settlement of what proved a winning $2 million libel suit (Jessica Van Sack, “Public reprimand urged for Judge Murphy”, Boston Herald, Nov. 21; see Sept. 28, etc.). The operators of the Irish Pub & Inn in Atlantic City, New Jersey are suing the publishers of Philly magazine over their description of the tavern as a “dive bar”, and aren’t buying the magazine’s claim that the description was intended as complimentary. (Michael Klein, Philadelphia Inquirer “Inqlings”, Nov. 18). And a New York lower court judge has declined to order Google/Blogspot to divulge the identity of “Orthomom”, whom a Lawrence, N.Y. school board member had sought to sue on the theory that it was defamatory to have termed her a “bigot”. (Nicole Black, Nov. 18, with links to other blog coverage).
More: And Eugene Volokh (Nov. 27) posts today on a disturbing case from Canada in which a lawyer involved in the shutting down of “hate speech” websites proceeded to sue for defamation — successfully so far in the Ontario courts — over having been called (among other things) an “enemy of free speech”.