Dorian Nakamoto Is Suing Newsweek

Good! I look forward to seeing the lack of method applied by Newsweek shown in court documents. It was a phenomenally irresponsible thing for them to publish, and I hope they pay for it.

edit: a friend pointed out that I should probably say that I write for nbc news so I'm kind of trashing the competition. This is really just my personal distaste speaking, though.

The reporter's attitude even after it was demonstrated how sloppy her work was (if she didn't know) really put a nail in the coffin of having any sympathy for her

As someone who has been fighting in court for a number of years against an author and publisher who widely distributed blatantly false material, with plenty of hard evidence to support my claims, I think this will be a really hard lawsuit to win. Newsweek will argue First Amendment all day long. Defamation law varies by state and California's standard involves "special damage," which might be hard to prove for someone without steady employment. (See http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-defamation-law.) There might be some kind of emotional distress claim, which would make sense, but it's not going to be easy to put a number on.

You might expect to see a settlement given Newsweek's backtracking.

[I'm not a lawyer. This isn't even close to being legal advice.]

It seems a lot of people forgot about the piece, or at least that’s what Newsweek is hoping.

Whether or not Dorian Nakamoto won the lawsuit or not, Newsweek’s credibility goes down at least a notch.

I hope something good for Dorian Nakamoto comes out of this whole nonsense because he's obviously a guy whose seen better times. Everyone at Newsweek needs to quit and go find a real job because their entire existence only made sense before Digg and Reddit came into existence. There's no journalism there, it's just the thing you flip through for the most attention-grabbing bits.

Yup, fair enough.

Looks like Newsweek fucked up.

Reporters are allowed to make mistakes in reporting, and accusing someone of inventing a famous and well-liked technology is not defamatory.

This will get killed on First Amendment grounds pretty quickly.

What if Satoshi Nakamoto donate to Dorian Nakamoto with bitcoin? That will be amazing ... ...

Dorian should sell his bitcoins to fund the lawsuit.

This is silly. If all the publicity really "hurt" him he wouldn't be spurring up all this publicity. He's just ganking fools for all they got.

It's worth noting that Newsweek is owned by the same folks who got hit with a $2.3MM fine by the EPA for knowingly violating asbestos removal rules. http://blog.wouldbetheologian.com/2014/04/thats-gotta-hurt.h...