Hacker News Reader

Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

Its important to be reminded regularly that there are perfectly legal ways for people with lots of money to endlessly bully people that annoy them. These people/companies have lawyers on retainer that they're already paying so its essentially free for them to file bogus suits and motions to cause havoc in your life. What are you going to do? Sue them back? Thats the world they live in, and its a world that as a small time person or corporation you can not win in (long term).

Look at Gawker and Peter Thiel--no matter how you feel personally about what they did, what they published about him was absolutely legal. As a background task his lawyers destroyed that company by keeping them tied up in court cases and funding any one with an axe to grind against them until they were gone.

View on HN

My mom was an attorney. A really sound piece of advice she gave me was, "Never get into a legal battle with a lawyer. You can't win." What she was saying was that an attorney can essentially sue you for free. (Ok not totally free but you get the point). They can tie you up in legal battles and force you to just waste money on something that is seemingly trivial. The same advice goes for someone who can spend large sums of money and not worry about the consequences.

There is this great scene in the movie "From The Hip" where the CEO of a bank assaulted another individual. The scene is his lawyer saying he thinks they can win the case. The CEO responds essentially with "You can't win. I hit him. Just make the case last 3 days so he has to spend more money." That pretty much sums up being rich and the power those people wield.

Can you refine “legal battle” further? Does it imply a complete immediate capitulation on all matters if the opponent is a lawyer, or does it imply something else, like one’s best advantage in this case is to stay out of the courtroom?

Really it's pretty much anything. Every case is different and in the law there is no black and white, meaning nothing is simple. Take this scenario, you have a dispute with a lawyer and they draft a legal document with certain statements and legal ramifications. At this point, the wise answer is to hire a lawyer and have them battle it out for you. At say 300 dollars an hour, if drafting a document takes an hour, you've just spent 300 dollars. This doesn't include any research your attorney has to do around the case which is also possible (remember no black and white in the law) or the fees of the administrative assistants to print and mail the response, etc. Your opponent may not be making money while perusing this, but that person isn't paying someone at a billing rate either. Stretching it out only bleeds your reserves to continue the dispute.

> Never get into a legal battle with a lawyer. You can't win.

My ex wife is a lawyer. I agree with this statement...

> an attorney can essentially sue you for free

Isn't his time essentially money?

People can be very irrational in their spending of time vs money, especially if its personal.

It is, but the lawyer gets endless free time (until they die), while the non-lawyer does not get endless free money.

The lawyer's time is neither endless nor free, but one can have endless and "free" money.

A lawyer and non-lawyer can write letters, but the formers carry a lot more weight than the latter

Gawker deserved someone to come after then as Thiel did, for what they did to him, Hulk Hogan and others

For what it's worth, I respectfully disagree. The people Thiel should have gone after are those who leaked to the public.

I can't say I read Gawker or was a fan of what they did, or saying it was morally upstanding. But they were the wrong target. It was bizarre to me that Thiel would go after them, except if you look at it as Thiel not really caring about the actual spread of information, and instead look at it as Thiel scaring away any sort of journalist or journalistic organization from scrutinizing him at all on any controversial topics. It just seemed like a classic case of defending the freedom of speech of the morally questionable to protect freedom of speech in general.

I don't remember the Hogan case in detail as it's been awhile, but to me Gawker was not the really offending person. It was whoever recorded that. Why Thiel went after Gawker rather than the person who clearly violated expectations of privacy in a way that might land them in jail in many districts is beyond me.

Gawker boasted that they won’t remove the video, no matter what, even after Hogan asked them. They 100% deserved what they got.

this is incorrect you're mixing several separate facts into one false narrative

gawker repeatedly offered to settle with hogan, but for some strange reason* hogan refused to and kept appealing and moving venues. during these appeals and negotiations a judge required gawker take the video down which they did. the judge then also required gawker take the post (ascii text) down as well, which they refused to do.

* it turned out hogan was just a front for thiel and taking down the video was not really the goal, bankrupting the parent company of valleywag was.

“A Judge Told Us to Take Down Our Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Post. We Won't.” - https://www.gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-take-down-our-hulk...

They refused to remove a text article describing the video. From your link:

"A lawful order from a circuit court judge is a serious thing. While we vehemently disagree with Campbell's order with respect to the video itself, we have chosen to take it down pending our appeal.

But the portion of the order compelling us to remove the entirety of Daulerio's post—his words, his speech—is grossly unconstitutional. We won't take it down"

If someone secretly recorded you having consensual sex and sold me the footage, you think I have a right to publish that. That's ridiculous. Gawker got what they deserved.

They didn't pay for it--someone (probably Bubba the Love Sponge) anonymously sent them the footage. He was legally able to record his own home.

Florida is a two-party consent state. Everyone featured in a recording not happening in public must consent to being recorded. Both Hogan and Heather claim they didn't know.

Ok, well same thing. Hogan was invited over to have sex with Bubba's wife and Bubba secretly filmed it and sent it to a media company.

are you a world renowned celebrity who goes on radio shows on a near weekly basis to brag about your sexual exploits and genital size to millions of people?

No. Who are you referring to? How is that relevant?

Have you heard Hulk Hogan speaking to Bubba the Love Sponge on radio It is informative to the case

I haven't. I doubt he gave consent to be recorded and then have that video distributed. So I don't see how it's relevant.

If I recall correctly, they publicly outed Thiel as a gay man, so I assumed that put them on his radar and he saw the Hogan incident as the opportunity to go all in on them.

He posted pictures of himself cavorting with naked young men on a public website. Is sharing those publicly outing him?

you recall incorrectly, but its a very easy mistake to make as every thread on the topic will be riddled with that false talking point.

the gay editor of gawker published the gay writer from valleywag's essay about how peter thiel was ALREADY 'out' and that everyone in silicon valley acting like it was a shameful secret that could not be mentioned was in-effect trying to put a gay man who was not in the closet back in it because of their discomfort with the topic.

like everything else on the internet once the facts got rung through the social media process the conventional wisdom became the perfect inverse of the actual truth.

its worth noting that thiel himself has never claimed that his 'outing' (which did not happen) was his motivation. he has however on many occasions explained his reasoning and justification as essentially viewing journalists/journalism/critical-reporting as haters that hold us all back and should be forcibly shut up. note that i'm using the word 'haters' but he actually used the word 'terrorists'.

Gawker publicly bullied and antagonized their victims. Doesn't matter what the law says its incredibly immoral, there was nothing to report.

They wouldn't stop hosting revenge porn, didn't pay interns, doxxed thousands of New Yorkers for daring to own a gun, and all the while ran article slamming people who did all those things. It really sucks that organizations who aren't the targets of billionaires won't get the same treatment but by god it was satisfying to watch.

I think both things can be said :

1) Gawker got what they deserved 2) The legal power of the very rich makes me uneasy, and I don't support such unilateral over-use of the legal system by the very rich.

In other words; Gawker got what they deserved, but I don't agree with the methodology behind the counter-attack -- I see it as abusive and indicative of a system that is tilted for one side to win more easily.

Yes, and even people like hulk hogan without the support of money are nothing against corporations like gawker.

The power scale is kinda Hulk Hogan < Gawker < Peter Thiel < pether Thiel + Hulk Hogan.

But in the end power (and money) are always amoral. Its their use which defines it. The only shocking thing is that justice is not free (even in countries in europe where education and healthcare are...).

The problem isn't that Thiel could destroy Gawker. The problem is that you couldn't if they did the same thing to you.

Thiel didn't take down Gawker by being richer and more powerful. He took them down in a fair trial because he was right and they were wrong. You would never get that fair trial because it would be millions in legal fees before you got there.

Sure, but the point is that Hogan had a Case, and Thiel financed it There are many people who did not have the same time or money as Thiel and Hogan, and those people got justice. Peter Thiel was not the only gay person they outed. Hogan is the not only sex tape they published

Yes, this is my point. They were bullies who finally met someone with the resources to stand up to them.

Gawker was certainly trashy journalism, but I think the only lesson anybody learned from that whole experience was "Don't fuck with Peter Thiel".

The lesson should have been that Thiel and other billionaires have such enormous influence over governments and courts that he's a direct threat to democratic systems. Just look at how things turned out, Hogan couldn't touch Gawker because of Freedom of the Press, but then Thiel got involved and suddenly the 1st Amendment stopped protecting Gawker. The moment a billionaire got involved the legal system changed.

And if you need any more proof that people like Thiel are a threat to democracy, he's currently funding conservative candidates in the US who believe the presidential election was "stolen" from Trump.

Funding conservative causes as a wealthy private individual does not make you a threat to democracy., American liberal progressives seem to repeat that notion and get hysterical about this any time it happens, while forgetting the sheer number of extremely rich billionaire progressive supporters of numerous causes they do favor. Are these people then not also threats to democracy? Or does this definition only begin to apply once a billionaire supports a thing you don't approve of?

He's not just funding "conservative causes" he's funding people who are contesting the previous election. He's giving money to people that believe the current government is fraudulent, so yes, that is a threat to our current democratic system.

And yes, billionaires who donate to "the left" are a problem as well. Any time enormous amounts of wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few people, it can't help but go against democratic ideals. You used the term "progressive" but both of the main US political parties have been bought out by wealthy interests, and I'd hardly call either "progressive".

If you've ever looked at leftist progressive commentators, they just as often complain of big money in politics for the democrats, or even for leftist causes.

Gawker was certainly trashy journalism, but I think the only lesson anybody learned from that whole experience was "Don't fuck with Peter Thiel".

Maybe I'm different from most people, but the lessons I learned were 1) there's a rich a-hole named Peter Thiel and 2) he's a petty spiteful vindictive a-hole (in my opinion based on what I know of his actions). In practical terms it mostly meant that when I saw news mention of him I knew who was being referred to.

The problem is that what Gawker did to Thiel, while not nice, was legal.

If you do something perfectly legal that someone does not like, and that person has sufficient money and/or power, they can simply go hunting for something illegal you've done (there's always something) and aggressively bankroll actions against you.

Thiel used Hogan and his case as a proxy to settle a personal beef.

This is not dissimilar from the cops tailing activists around in their daily lives, hoping they can find something, anything, to charge them with.

>The problem is that what Gawker did to Thiel, while not nice, was legal.

And then what Thiel did to Gawker, while not nice, was legal.

If you're going to build a company on the idea of skirting legality in order to ruin people's lives, don't be upset when someone does the same thing to your company.

> If you're going to build a company on the idea of skirting legality in order to ruin people's lives, don't be upset when someone does the same thing to your company.

It took me a second to realize you were not talking about palantir.

Or ebay.

Thiel getting angry about a story around his sexuality (it wasn't "outing" him, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265067) is pretty fucking hilarious coming from the guy who founded what amounts to a corporate-run NSA.

I think you are forgetting a significant part of that story, which is that Gawker published it around the time of Thiel's business trip to Saudi Arabia.

Given the general attitude in that country towards homosexuality and that it is straight up a crime in SA, not only Gawker was essentially sabotaging his business deal, they were opening him up to physical danger and criminal prosecution.

I agree with you up to a point. However there are real limits to what the rich and powerful can do before the peasants revolt. The current American Elites have completely forgotten the concept of "noblesse oblige" and I believe we are currently seeing the start of a peasant rebellion.

It starts with rejection of the mainstream media, academics, and other "experts".

In the case of Peter Thiel, he is extremely hated among emerging factions of the radical left and dissident right.

Based on this summary of the Gawker/Thiel story, it seems like they mostly brought it upon themselves: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56kz4d/til_t....

Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday is the definitive account of this story. It's very well written and full of intrigue. A great book, one of the best I've read in years.

The only part of the book that seems out of place is near the end, where you see Holiday's speculation on Thiel's (who Holiday clearly admires) association with Trump (who Holiday clearly despises.) He simply can't understand why Thiel would associate with Trump at all.

https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Peter-Gawker-Anatomy-Intri...

One more mechanism by which those at the top can reinforce their position.

So why does the US justice system allow this? It's occupying the whole legal system with time wasters.

I'm glad I don't work in legal, it sounds so drawn out and boring.

The justice system is kinda made for handling all these disputes that people can’t talk out themselves. The lawyers are incentivized to drag it out because they almost always get paid by the hour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com