[msla]

> beyond that lawsuit being a convenient stalking horse against a target that he already wanted to take out.

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.

[matt4077]

The Gawker case was terrible precisely because Gawker kinda deserved it.

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.

[msla]

> What if he gets angry at politico.com because they write articles criticising his favourite politician?

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.

[aetherson]

Where's the source of the information that Thiel was actually in Saudi Arabia when the Valleywag article was published? I searched, and all I see is unsourced assertions in the comments sections of articles.

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.

[msla]

Huh. I can't find any solid cites, either.

Maybe it is just a BS rumor.