[kaze]

I was wrong in my opinion. If legal reports show Tripathi wasn't involved, the family should take legal action against the Reddit users who participated in this garbage, AND Reddit itself. The former for libel, and the latter for having failed to apply effective moderation. Freedom of speech is very important, but this was a public lynching. Granted that it is difficult for a website to moderate each and every thing, but an honest effort should be made. This can be achieved by steps such as having traffic based or user flagging based triggers leading to an informed policy driven review. And the policy can definitely be good enough to help recognize damaging accusations of this kind.

Any organisation, be a website, news organization, or Government, should be punished if it tolerates a Kangaroo court culture. Else we risk exposing just about any innocent person (us and our families included) to permanent damage.

[mpyne]

So by your same logic then we should expect large file hosts such as Dropbox and MegaUpload to take active moderation measures to ensure that they are not used as springboards for minor crimes... such as copyright infringement?

[tzs]

The law is capable of taking into account both intent and predictability of outcomes. Dropbox does not intend their site to be used for copyright infringement, whereas MegaUpload encouraged it.