Caching is probably the most worrisome. Copyright issues aside, how about libel?

Here’s a true story. I personally have been the target of an insane cyber-stalker. One of those net.kooks was associated in an unsavory way with a woman I briefly dated, which resulted in my name being added to his insane usenet ramblings. Most of them were quite horrible. He called me at least a drug abuser, a child molester (!!! he also levied that accusation against his ex-wife, several state agencies, doctors…), a mental patient and impotent. If he weren’t judgment-proof…

Now, obviously, nobody’s gonna believe this known net.kook. Nonetheless, I could just see some state bar searching for my name and coming up with this stuff, and I’d have an unpleasant explanation to give. So every once in a while, I find this nutter’s libels reposted on some usenet-archiving website. I send the proprietor a polite, utterly non-threatening, e-mail explaining the situation and asking them to take it down. Invariably, they do. Because, really, they don’t want to be responsible for that kind of garbage.

Well, search for “Paul Gowder impotent” on google. (No quotes.) It links a bunch of pages — and excerpts the lies. The linked pages have been taken down. But at least two of them have been “cached.”

Now how am I to get rid of THAT republication of a libel? Google (present counsel excepted) isn’t terribly responsive to polite “please look at what you’re caching” e-mails. Should someone in my position have to suffer this republication of grossly libelous comments?

It seems the only way to rid onesself of such a thing would be to break out the C&D letters. Now obviously, I don’t intend to do so. I’ve got better things to do.

But is this right? Imagine someone who is in a more vulnerable position, with a more credible and recent accuser. Imagine someone who succeeds in utterly rending the credibility of their attacker so no publisher, even an ISP, will touch them with a twenty thousand foot pole. Must they still suffer the slings and arrows of an unaccountable Google?

(As you can tell, I’ve been reading though old blogs lately — mainly in aid of fodder for my own blog — shameless plug! — http://www.paultopia.org/blog/ )

-Paul

Didn’t mean to post three times. I was editing my post, then hitting “post” but nothing was happening.

Sorry!

As far as I know, search engines have no such burden–unless, and I’m guessing here, they accept paid advertisement from an infringer’s site. And after they’ve been warned. That would seem a reasonable extrapolation of the ISP-liability situation.

But making them liable for just indexing billions of webpages and then returning, as Wendy writes, the results requested.

This is nothing more than a money grab. The goals, imho, were two: all the free advertising for the perfect10.com site (and if those girls are “natural”, I must’ve missed the part of biology that allows women to grow silicon in their breasts without the annoying five figure surgical fees).

Second, I assume they were looking for nuisance value–mostly likely in the form of stock options or grants, I’d guess.

Prediction: this’ll be dismissed faster than it takes for one of their “natural” models to grow two cup sizes in the operating room.

And it should be! Otherwise, such a precedent will be used by companies as a form of SLAPP suit, only for buisness. Companies getting criticized by sites like, e.g. walmartsucks.net, will simply threaten to sue and undercapitalized news media will simply refuse to cover anything which could be annoying to a corporation. And even wealthy companies like Yahoo will make sure nothing offensive to anyone with enough money to hire shysters is posted anywhere on their site or in the search results–just to avoid the hassle. This has to be stopped.

Something similar to this has happened many times. Before Yahoo and others got smart, they’d turn over the id of any poster criticizing a company just on request. People who were employees suddenly found themselves being fired and/or sued for simply expressing their opinion. Fortunately, Yahoo, et al, quit simply bending over and got a little backbone.

It’s really a backdoor attempt to muzzle and, ultimately, waterdown free expression in cyberspace until the only thing legal will be posting pics of your family picnicks on your yahoo page.

Far as I know, search engines have no such burden–unless, and I’m guessing here, they accept paid advertisement from an infringer’s site. And after they’ve been warned. That would seem a reasonable extrapolation of the ISP-liability situation.

But making them liable for just indexing billions of webpages and then returning, as Wendy writes, the results requested.

This is nothing more than a money grab. The goals, imho, were two: all the free advertising for the perfect10.com site (and if those girls are “natural”, I must’ve missed the part of biology that allows women to grow silicon in their breasts without the annoying five figure surgical fees).

Second, I assume they were looking for nuisance value–mostly likely in the form of stock options or grants, I’d guess.

Prediction: this’ll be dismissed faster than it takes for one of their “natural” models to grow two cup sizes in the operating room.

And it should be! Otherwise, such a precedent will be used by companies as a form of SLAPP suit, only for buisness. Companies getting criticized by sites like, e.g. walmartsucks.net, will simply threaten to sue and undercapitalized news media will simply refuse to cover anything which could be annoying to a corporation. And even wealthy companies like Yahoo will make sure nothing offensive to anyone with enough money to hire shysters is posted anywhere on their site or in the search results–just to avoid the hassle. This has to be stopped.

Something similar to this has happened many times. Before Yahoo and others got smart, they’d turn over the id of any poster criticizing a company just on request. People who were employees suddenly found themselves being fired and/or sued for simply expressing their opinion. Fortunately, Yahoo, et al, quit simply bending over and got a little backbone.

It’s really a backdoor attempt to muzzle and, ultimately, waterdown free expression in cyberspace until the only thing legal will be posting pics of your family picnicks on your yahoo page.

Far as I know, search engines have no such burden–unless, and I’m guessing here, they accept paid advertisement from an infringer’s site. And after they’ve been warned. That would seem a reasonable extrapolation of the ISP-liability situation.

But making them liable for just indexing billions of webpages and then returning, as Wendy writes, the results requested.

This is nothing more than a money grab. The goals, imho, were two: all the free advertising for the perfect10.com site (and if those girls are “natural”, I must’ve missed the part of biology that allows women to grow silicon in their breasts without the annoying five figure surgical fees).

Second, I assume they were looking for nuisance value–mostly likely in the form of stock options or grants, I’d guess.

Prediction: this’ll be dismissed faster than it takes for one of their “natural” models to grow two cup sizes in the operating room.

And it should be! Otherwise, such a precedent will be used by companies as a form of SLAPP suit, only for buisness. Companies getting criticized by sites like, e.g. walmartsucks.net, will simply threaten to sue and undercapitalized news media will simply refuse to cover anything which could be annoying to a corporation. And even wealthy companies like Yahoo will make sure nothing offensive to anyone with enough money to hire shysters is posted anywhere on their site or in the search results–just to avoid the hassle. This has to be stopped.

Something similar to this has happened many times. Before Yahoo and others got smart, they’d turn over the id of any poster criticizing a company just on request. People who were employees suddenly found themselves being fired and/or sued for simply expressing their opinion. Fortunately, Yahoo, et al, quit simply bending over and got a little backbone.

It’s really a backdoor attempt to muzzle and, ultimately, waterdown free expression in cyberspace until the only thing legal will be posting pics of your family picnicks on your yahoo page.

Last we heard from Perfect 10, the porn purveyer failed miserably in its Induce Act-like attempt to hold credit card companies liable when people use the cards to purchase access to purloined Perfect 10 pics. Andrew Bridges, a partner in…