To those wishing/pretending/actually trying to sue us:
Are you aware of the past attempts to sue and shut down fornits? How successful were they?
you can't sue fornits. Fornits is not a sueable entity. You can sue ginger, but she is not liable for anything that is said on the site. this is a free speech zone.
not legal advice -->
More or less, thanks to the communcations decency act section 230(c)
you cannot sue an anonymous "guest".
You can. You can sue a doe and find out later the identity of the person. Of course with modern proxies this can be very difficult, if not impossible, technically. Web proxies can be in all sorts of countries causing jurisdictional issues, proxies regularly wipe logs (or don't keep them at all), and tor pretty much ensures nobody will ever be able to trace your identity.
You're only possibly going to be able to go after individuals. If you somehow magically are able to convince a judge and jury that you can prove that so-and-so is directly responsible for assorted damages, then you might get your revenge. But you wont be getting your revenge. Ya know why? First off, you need to prove that what they are saying is NOT true. To do that, your respective institutions will be scrutinized and investigated from every angle - not just the claims - in order to establish that the economic harm that came as a result of the supposed defamation was not in fact caused by your own actions, and establish weather or not the statements in question were true or false. You cannot be sued for a true statement that caused harm to a public entity such as a school. you can only sue an individual for (for example) intruding on their privacy by making public an embarrassing behavior. This does not apply to politicians, neither does it to headmasters or teachers.
It's actually considerably
more difficult than what you're implying, which isn't entirely corrrect, but mostly. Public figures, or limited purpose public figures,
can win a lawsuit, but only if they can prove a statement was made against them with actual malice (that a person knew a statement of fact was false and said it anyway). Proving that is very very difficult. Also damage are very hard to prove since you can't use heresay evidence in court. You basically have to find somebody who says "i was going to purchase X service/product from the plaintiff but did not because of a statement on Fornits"... and that person has to be willing to testify. How do you find such a person? Educational consultants saying "some of our customers have been unwilling to commit because of this posting" doesn't count because it's heresay. A decline in profit is not evidence either. There has to be a direct link.
you can only sue an individual for (for example) intruding on their privacy by making public an embarrassing behavior.
Generally not true. That's very much allowed. It has to be a false statement of fact for a defamation tort. Only certain states allow "public disclosure of private fact" or "false light" or something that might cover what you're implying. I'm not sure about the legal issues surrounding those torts but I'm pretty sure it's probably quite difficult to win as well.
What's even worse for programs is that many states now have very strong anti-slapp legislation, meaning somebody filing such a suit can be made to pay both parties' legal costs (court costs as well as attorneys fees, sometimes with a multiplier). Even in states that don't have such legislation, one can still file a malicious prosecution suit.
There are only a handful of people on this site who you can prove to be actual people, such as psy
Nope. Not even Benchmark could prove that, and we weren't about to admit it to let them further complicate the suit after they already established a pattern of painting a moving target, was the judge ruled later was impermissible anyway because the anti-slapp motion forbade them from amending their complaint (for that reason). They kept coming up with new statements they claimed to be defamatory after we kept showing them to be true or opinion. Eventually they ran out of statements on my website and started pilfering through fornits and even ISACcorp. They blamed certain posts on me and we just didn't respond after that. It was "chaff" as my lawyers called it. All it ended up doing was increase their final legal costs by increasing the time my lawyers spent. Anyway.. all they could show is that I claim to be Michael Crawford and (may) have a lot of personal information about him. There's nothing else that can be proven. Evidence has to be admissible too and there are a whole host of ways to exclude it.
To my knowledge and from my experience, psy and the others are very careful about what they post.
This is true. Even in light of all the above, I try and be as accurate as possible. You should do the same thing if you're a guest, not because you think you're invincible (not quite true always), but because it's the right thing to do. You don't have to lie about programs to make them look bad anyway. The truth is horrid enough. Hell. Let them speak for themselves and they'll tie themselves a noose sooner or later.
^^^ above is not legal advice
