Keep in mind, a celebrity did not have enough money to take on a shittly little website in a lawsuit, so even he had to find another backer. Imagine if Gawker decided to publish your private info. Would you have enough money to defend your privacy?
That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that the backer in question didn't give a shit about Hulk Hogan and his sex tape, beyond that lawsuit being a convenient stalking horse against a target that he already wanted to take out. (If this was just up to Hogan, he'd likely have taken one of the settlements offered, and almost certainly wouldn't have dropped the claim of "negligent infliction of emotional distress," a move whose only point was to prevent Gawker's insurance company from being able to cover any part of the damages.) In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that Thiel backed several lawsuits against Gawker, including one from the same yoyo who claims to have invented email that's suing Techdirt now. And Thiel won't say if he's bankrolling Ayyuadurai's lawsuit against Techdirt, which is being brought by the same attorney Thiel hired for Hogan. What a strange coincidence!
Celebrity rags being sued isn't a precedent; having a billionaire fund other people's lawsuits until he finds one that sticks is. And there's a small but non-zero chance that the lawsuit we're talking about right now is one of those lawsuits, and unlike the Hogan case, the plaintiff is clearly in the wrong. Journalists, and I won't put the snide air quotes around the word, aren't that worried about the "if you publish somebody's leaked sex tape you can get sued for it" part of this matter. They're worried about the other part.
OK, so why did he have it in for Gawker?
They outed him as gay against his will while he was in Saudi Arabia.
(Edited To Add: I can't find any good cites saying he was in Saudi Arabia at the time, so I don't know one way or the other right now. Regardless, the outing itself was morally wrong, so my argument doesn't change.)
That's behavior which should be punished, morally, even if it isn't illegal. It's certainly behavior which anyone with a brain can realize would lead to making the person you outed an enemy.
It seems Gawker's main sin was making an enemy of someone who could hurt them, and the injustice here is that most assholes don't have such enemies.
The only mention of Saudi Arabia in connection with the story that I can find in actual articles rather than comments is the assertion that Thiel was pissed off about being outed because it made it harder for him to secure funding from Saudia Arabian sources.
Maybe it is just a BS rumor.
Legally, there wasn't much that Thiel could do, which is why he found another way to get his revenge.
The problem: Thiel's reason for bankrupting Gawker didn't need to be somewhat reasonable. He could have used the exact same tactics for any other reason. What if he gets angry at politico.com because they write articles criticising his favourite politician?
The only barrier to complete control of the media by a select number of plutocrats is that the specific case he used (the sex tape) was so egregious that you won't be able to make similar cases against serious publishers.
And that's why this article is relevant: it's about some guy's obsession with being recognised as the inventor of e-mail. If he wins, ruining any publisher would become a whole lot easier overnight. Because if this plaintiff was anywhere near the invention of email, it may come down to a subjective judgement of assigning "inventor" status.
In general, it seems to me that the results of the American justice system are vastly better than people give it credit for, and I'd be pretty confident that a jury, or any of a number of courts along the way to the SC would ensure some proportionality. But the scary thing is that only one in a hundred of such cases succeeding would be enough to seriously imperil the freedom of the press.
OK, what if Politico.com doesn't do anything illegal or actionable subsequent to that?
The only reason Thiel had the power he had over Gawker is that Gawker did something which was actually, legally wrong after it wronged him in a non-actionable fashion. Unless you have both of those elements, Thiel would have been powerless to redress the grievance he had in any very quick fashion. He could have done other things, but Gawker did him the favor of stepping onto the firing range after they painted the target on themselves.
> The only barrier to complete control of the media by a select number of plutocrats is that the specific case he used (the sex tape) was so egregious that you won't be able to make similar cases against serious publishers.
Rephrase: "The only barrier to complete control of the media by a select number of plutocrats is that most of the media can refrain from doing flagrantly illegal bullshit."
> And that's why this article is relevant: it's about some guy's obsession with being recognised as the inventor of e-mail. If he wins, ruining any publisher would become a whole lot easier overnight.
He isn't going to win. People who can dispute his claims totally are still alive (OK, one of the main people has died, but you don't have to be the inventor to disprove this yahoo) and plenty of records have been kept.
Thiel is funding a loser of a case here, and, despite what some people believe, an expensive lawyer can't save a loser of a case.