[cornellwright]

Yes of course you should. This is no different than a lawyer taking a case on contingency. It provides people without the means to hire a legal team a way to take on more well-financed opponents.

While abuse of the legal system is certainly a problem, the way to solve it is not limit financing. That only increases economic inequality. It's like saying we can solve the SF housing crisis by banning mortgages.

[tacotuesday]

Didn't Microsoft do this with SCO vs Linux though? In that case, it was big incumbent interested in squashing a scrappy start-up disrupting the industry.

In a case like that, it seems like a tool to perpetuate economic inequality.

[cornellwright]

Yes, but how do you stop that? Isn't any investment in a company involved in litigation implicitly an investment in the litigation? (Or at least a bet that the litigation isn't material to their business.)

The whole SCO vs IBM case was pretty unscrupulous, sleazy, and opportunistic, I agree. I'm not arguing that I have the solution to stop abuses like this. I'm saying that limiting financing is not it.

[JoshTriplett]

> Yes, but how do you stop that?

Not by limiting financing, but by recognizing and shutting down barratry and stunts.

[magila]

Microsoft only needed to go through SCO to hide their involvement in the case. If they hadn't cared about a possible DoJ investigation MS could have simply bought SCO and brought the suit themselves. Also, SCO's main lawsuit was against IBM, the complete opposite of a "scrappy start-up".

[6stringmerc]

I'm not entirely certain why, but the logic you employ here strikes me as very similar to the justifications used to support the Citizens United ruling.

The abuse of the legal system is, from my perspective, extremely tied to the fiscal means of the involved parties. I say this having been called to potentially be on a jury involving a claim of breach of confidentiality over a Rothko painting, asking for more than $30 million (eventually the jury verdict was a pyrrhic victory of $500,000 - likely the cost of the suit in the first place).

I guess what I'm saying is that for small-time folks, even judgments in small-claims court are tenuous in enforcement, because...well...there's not enough money involved for authorities and other entities to follow through. To me that's a distortion of the purpose of the legal system, and one where money certainly plays a role. Rather, economic inequality may result in justice inequality (a study of this would be very helpful).

[hga]

I'm not entirely certain why, but the logic you employ here strikes me as very similar to the justifications used to support the Citizens United ruling.

I'm not certain why, either, seeing as how Citizens United was about core political speech, Federal government censorship of a video about a candidate for federal office, which if the First Amendment, specifically:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

Means anything, it means such speech cannot be abridged.

[6stringmerc]

I guess I mean in practical outcomes - that money equates to speech, therefore freedom of money in politics has done the exact opposite of campaign finance reform.

[Frondo]

No freedom is or has ever been absolute, certainly not 1st amendment freedoms (e.g. fraud).

[hga]

The only speech I'm talking about, the only speech which was the subject of Citizens United, is core political speech.

In that context, in the traditional US context, there's no "fraud", AKA criminal libel. Although I don't agree with the extremes of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which removed useful feedback in the system in the civil law arena, current case law makes protection of core political speech all but "absolute".

[6stringmerc]

To paraphrase the late great Hunter S. Thompson:

"There was a rumor going around the circle of journalists, and while I was the one who started the rumor, its existence meant I could report it as a fact."