I certainly don't agree with the way the doc has chosen to handle this, but I sympathize to a degree. There's no shortage of ignorance about how the Internet works among otherwise educated people.
Also, the author seems a bit disingenuous.
>The web site in question is Retraction Watch. I recently discussed other foolish threats made against them, and discussed their mission: offering a "window on the scientific process" by which scientific articles are criticized, retracted, or modified."
The full statement is "Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process". This is a 2200+ word post, seems unlikely those three words had to be clipped in the interest of brevity.
>He's acted like an angry blustering oaf who is pathologically intolerant of criticism. Ask yourself — how much do you trust the work of a scientist who threatens to sue for true reports of peer review of his work? Would you feel comfortable ingesting a drug developed by a chemist who threatens criminal charges against someone who reports — truly and accurately — that other scientists have raised questions about his conclusions? Would you hire a consultant who makes foolish public legal threats without first acquiring any grasp whatsoever of the applicable law? Would you invest in a pharmaceutical company whose Chief Scientific Officer utters civil and criminal threats against reports of scientific dissent?
Being unnecessarily nasty to and making fun of people who make misguided legal threats is par for the course for popehat. It's fun to read, but in my opinion not really laudable.
He seems quite concerned with the Streisand Effect. Maybe there's a bit of link bait going on here? If he can convince the good doctor to threaten suit against him, maybe he can be the benefactor instead of Retraction Watch. </tinfoil-hat>
[Edit: If nothing else, heated/opinionated discussion makes for interesting reading.]
Chances are that he's thinking in a civil law mindset, seeing as he's from Argentina. Some other countries have far stricter laws on defamation than the US. Indeed, I actually think US laws are a bit too weak, resulting things like exploitation of mugshots for commercial profit and so on.
4a. Mugshots disappearing from site A but reappearing on site B. Rinse, wash, repeat.
4b. An "administration fee" being charged for the service of taking down mugshot. See 4a.
There are crimes which are considered so heinous that even being publicly accused can carry a very substantial social stigma. Consider the recent exceptionally public allegations against a prominent Silicon Valley insider of rape by another SV insider.
In other cases, the increasing use of background checks, not limited to criminal convictions but including searches of social media, news, and the general Internet, means that such false allegations might appear.
Again: take the case of individuals who were falsely accused of being the Boston Marathon bombers, including a missing college student and a high school student fingered by the New York Post (which "stands by its reporting" for whatever the hell that means). Or today's story that a man arrested in connection with ricin-laced letters being sent to congressmen and the President being released.
If that still doesn't work, picture this: you wake up tomorrow to find the police at your door. Why? An ex-girlfriend, or ex-boyfriend, or co-worker, or child at the charity you volunteer with, or some total stranger, has just made up completely random shit about you. Or your image is similar to that of someone photographed doing something Really Really Bad. Or your Twitter / Facebook / HN account has been hacked and is spewing bile or terrorist threats.
It all sounds very abstract until it isn't.
There's a reason why the authors of the US Constitution insisted on due process.
Well maybe the police shouldn't release mugshots, but that's different from making it illegal for people to have them.
>If that still doesn't work, picture this: you wake up tomorrow to find the police at your door. Why? An ex-girlfriend, or ex-boyfriend, or co-worker, or child at the charity you volunteer with, or some total stranger, has just made up completely random shit about you. Or your image is similar to that of someone photographed doing something Really Really Bad. Or your Twitter / Facebook / HN account has been hacked and is spewing bile or terrorist threats.
The purpose of many of these sites is to extort money from people who have had mugshots taken of them, regardless of whether they are ultimately guilty or innocent, and long after they have since served their time or been found innocent. Imagine you are accused of a crime you did not commit, are arrested and end up in jail long enough to lose your job, are found innocent, but searches for your name come up with your mugshot and outdated information about the crime you never committed... because 10 sites have all decided to make you a part of their list. And you can have your mugshot taken down, if you will agree to pay them $50. Each.
Over the years this picture has provided many, including me, with repeated minor amusement. If I featured in a similar mugshot and it afforded someone else with amusement, well turnabout is fair play.
There is no such mugshot of me, but I would not think it a big deal if there was. And I doubt that Bill Gates worries himself about the fact that that is out there.
By contrast if my right to free speech could be shut down just because Bill Gates does not like that particular picture, then what other speech could he shut down because he, or some other influential person, disliked it? I heartily agree that free speech is often abused. But when you open the door to shutting down speech, there is a short road from there to a loss of democracy. That would scare me.
Consider this well. The USA is messy, but has been a democracy for hundreds of years and few are concerned that it is about to become a dictatorship. By contrast Brazilian democracy is younger than me, and it is by no means certain that I won't survive long enough to see another military dictatorship there.
Now imagine the mugshot isn't for a minor traffic offence, but is for a rape or child abuse offence; and that the person photographed was released without charge and never prosecuted.
That mugshot now becomes a severe problem for you, risking your employment, and even your life.
By contrast if my right to free speech could be shut down just because Bill Gates does not like that particular picture
You have a right to free speech, but I'd argue that bill Gates ought to have a right to privacy that would prevent the police from releasing his mugshot in the first place.
To take a more serious example, I have Showdead enabled on HN so I see all the posts on the new page that are auto-flagged. The other day I saw one from a site I didn't recognize relating to photographs of the Boston bombing suspects (this was before the second one had been caught). It had been flagged but I was curious about the ongoing story so I went to the URL. well, it turned out to be the morgue photo of the older brother, on a blog that specializes in, well, morgue photos. I've worked in a hospital including a stint in a mortuary so I'm not mentally scarred by seeing a dead body, even a badly damaged one, but I do question to what extent freedom of speech should allow commercial exploitation of this sort.
There is no such mugshot of me, but I would not think it a big deal if there was.
Sure, because in Bill Gates' mugshot, you can tell he's not terribly worried about how this is going to affect his life, and I wouldn't be either for some kinds of offenses. But suppose you were unfortunate enough to be an alcoholic or got caught up in some sticky situation. If you were falsely accused of a sex crime or something your professional life might suddenly come to a crashing halt.
And now imagine also that there is a perfectly guilty rapist but, have exactly the same name as you (ups)
And when an possible employer enter your name in google the name rapist and the mugshot appears, and when you are in an airport you wait for an hour and probably lose the next flight typically until a bored airport policeman finds that, mmh, not, probably not the same people... maybe we could keep him/her another 20 minutes?
If you're Bill Gates you're not going to care much. But if you're an unemployed software developer you'd have to wonder if the places you send your resume to are doing a goggle search and getting that mug shot. Don't pretend like this isn't an issue. It is unless you're so rich that basically nothing could be an issue.
And don't pretend this is about free speech. You have no right to be in possession of these photos or at least you shouldn't have.
You ask a fair question, which I wrote about in a post just in the last day or so. (I was remembering a post from more than a year ago, as I recall, from another HN participant.) Different societies resolve these trade-offs differently, but the United States strongly favors making all arrest records public precisely to avoid having secret arrests, a feature of life in countries with a secret police service. (I have lived in such a country.) Yeah, sure, if I had a mugshot, I'd rather not have it all over the Internet, but if I did have a mugshot on the Internet, it wouldn't displace everything else about me on the Internet. As I recall, there is a mug shot of Bill Gates on the Internet, but that doesn't do the most to form his reputation.
So simply put, the trade-off here in the United States is that speech is counteracted by more speech. Rather little is done in secret here. Again, I have lived where the trade-offs are different, and I think that this is a generally desirable trade-off, and that United States defamation law strikes a good balance, with the defence of truth being very dispositive in defamation cases.
AFTER EDIT: Contrary to what is suggested by HN participant lutusp in another subthread here, there is no "false light" problem in the case the complaining doctor is complaining about. I am a lawyer, and I wouldn't dream of relying on Wikipedia for legal advice or even lay summaries of the law on most subjects.
Sorry about the slow reply - I didn't expect this sub-thread to be so lively. I get the legal arguments for your position, but have a third perspective, being from Western Europe. I think the best thing I could do is work this pet issue of mine up into an essay and make it into its own thread later.
Well with the internet pretty much anything you do or that happens to you is going to circulate around the internet forever. Maybe the police shouldn't release that kind of information, but as far as being illegal for people to spread it is censorship and ridiculous.
Paul Curtis was arrested by the FBI last week, and on Tuesday he was released without charges, when the FBI found there was zero evidence in pursue charges. But his name and face were among the top stories, not related to the Boston bombings, in the past week. Much like many of those wrongly and very publicly arrested, he will now have some troubles in the future from those who may still believe he was responsible. As we know, information on the Internet, for the most part, lasts forever.
I guess this is what happens when you get angry and threaten someone who knows better than to be scared.
I wonder what the author would have done if the initial email had been a plead, especially if only to make the article say something like "NOT A RETRACTION" in the title.
If it had been me I would have responded much more kindly to a plead than to a threat.
Another classic example of the Streisand Effect. If he really wanted something changed or the fact that it wasn't a retraction more visible, he could of emailed the owner of the blog and politely asked if there was a compromise that could be reached.
Not really the case here because the article specifically calls out what happened, but it can't really be the case that the name of the blog or site should play NO role in determining defamation, right?
If I run a blog called "Murderer Watch: Keeping an Eye on Murderers and Things" and I post "Bob Jones is 34 and lives in Atlanta, GA," that can't be totally okay just because those are all factual statements, right?
A quote: "Among the doctrines that defeat Dr. Fernandez' theory are these: truth is an absolute defense to defamation."
Would that it were so. In the U.S., where these events took place, there is a legal principle called "false light", in which truthful remarks can still lead to a judgment against a defendant on the ground that the truths were selected in such a way as to cast the plaintiff in a false light.
You are missing a BIG part of that tort: "made with actual malice." You cant be sued for accidental false light, you have to purposely cast a false light on facts with malicious intent.
"Truth is always an absolute defense against a defamation suit in the United States."
> You cant be sued for accidental false light, you have to purposely cast a false light on facts with malicious intent.
It's more accurate to say that the plaintiff has to substantiate malicious intent in court. Whether there is actual malice is more a matter of philosophy than law. Since the standard in civil court is preponderance, making that showing isn't as difficult as it might be in a criminal court.
Then there's the issue of whether the plaintiff is, or can be portrayed as, a public figure -- that changes everything.
Also, the author seems a bit disingenuous.
>The web site in question is Retraction Watch. I recently discussed other foolish threats made against them, and discussed their mission: offering a "window on the scientific process" by which scientific articles are criticized, retracted, or modified."
The full statement is "Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process". This is a 2200+ word post, seems unlikely those three words had to be clipped in the interest of brevity.
>He's acted like an angry blustering oaf who is pathologically intolerant of criticism. Ask yourself — how much do you trust the work of a scientist who threatens to sue for true reports of peer review of his work? Would you feel comfortable ingesting a drug developed by a chemist who threatens criminal charges against someone who reports — truly and accurately — that other scientists have raised questions about his conclusions? Would you hire a consultant who makes foolish public legal threats without first acquiring any grasp whatsoever of the applicable law? Would you invest in a pharmaceutical company whose Chief Scientific Officer utters civil and criminal threats against reports of scientific dissent?
That seems unnecessarily nasty.