Gawker Media (Kotaku, Gawker, Jezebel, etc.) loses lawsuit and is fined $115M

[Nosebleed]

For those who didn't know yet, Gawker Media, the company that owns several "news" websites like Kotaku, has been involved in a lawsuit with Hulk Hogan because of a sex tape that was leaked on gawker.com.

The lawsuit has been going on for a while but today the court has finally settled the case, and the veredict is that Gawker Media needs to pay 115 million dollars to Hulk Hogan.

Here's the kicker though, Gawker Media does NOT have that much money. Their revenue last year didn't even reach the 100 million dollars, at least according to a quick google search.

I don't know anything about the US justice system or justice in general, but for those who do, could this actually mean serious trouble for websites like Kotaku?

Honestly, my inner sadist is kinda happy that these terrible """news sites""" are taking a hit for their shitty practices and constant search for clickbait.

[Arcadeotic]

Hm

That's something

Honestly, I'm quite happy for the prospect of improving the quality and shrewdness of clickbait titles and practices, although it might come with a heavy place, for Kotaku and the such.

[Darklord Rooke]

Plus additional damages pending appeal. Disgusting piece of journalism and journalists do need to know there's a line that shouldn't be crossed. But the number of quality journalists in existence have been in decline. 

That being said, Kotaku gets a bad rap for some fairly tame reasons. There's usually not much wrong with the articles, people hate on them because of internet reasons, which tend to lack reasoning and logic.

Game journalism has been shit for a decade now, but Kotaku gets a bad rap for 'bad journalism'? Yeah, good job people.

[mitchhamilton]

6 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

For those who didn't know yet, Gawker Media, the company that owns several "news" websites like Kotaku, has been involved in a lawsuit with Hulk Hogan because of a sex tape that was leaked on gawker.com.

The lawsuit has been going on for a while but today the court has finally settled the case, and the veredict is that Gawker Media needs to pay 115 million dollars to Hulk Hogan.

Here's the kicker though, Gawker Media does NOT have that much money. Their revenue last year didn't even reach the 100 million dollars, at least according to a quick google search.

I don't know anything about the US justice system or justice in general, but for those who do, could this actually mean serious trouble for websites like Kotaku?

Honestly, my inner sadist is kinda happy that these terrible """news sites""" are taking a hit for their shitty practices and constant search for clickbait.

most likely this will affect kotaku. if they are unable to find the funds to pay the lawsuit, theyll have to sell property they own which could mean the shutdown of sites like kotaku or any other news site they might own. they go after their business, sell off what they can and if that is not enough to pay off the fine they go after personal property.

[Deep Blue]

https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/CckaXaiXEAIH09n.mp4

 

[Decay]

My thoughts are mixed, because on one hand Hogan is a racist, sexist, homophobic, wife-beating scumbag. On the other hand, Gawker is among the vilest online publications out there. They are so atrociously bad. They routinely just make up shit to publish as fact, and have absolutely no sense of ethics whatsoever.

This does impact Kotaku, which is a little unfortunate. The site definitely has its issues, but I think they do some really good reporting as well. 

One thing to note is that this decision WILL get appealed, and the appellate court, while I doubt they'll reverse the decision, they will almost certainly reduce the level of damages. Because this is an extreme amount of damages, especially when you consider that the jurors want punitive damages on top of the $115m.

[Eclipsed]

Makes $11k off of video, has to cough up $115M. worth

[Nimbus]

Good Riddance to bad journalism I say

 

 

[FruitsPunchSamurai]

They brought this upon themselves. They were ordered by a judge to take down his sextape and they refused, so it's their own fault. I don't like Hogan, but damn Gawker truly is awful so good riddance. It will go to the appeals court and will most likely get the damages reduced somewhat but that's still alot of money lost. Let this be a lesson to those "tabloids" that they should stick to actual news and not celebrity trash and gossip.

 

[Flutterz]

Jurnalizm at its finest

[Decay]

22 minutes ago, Nimbus said:

Good Riddance to bad journalism I say

 

 

I like how half of the articles they show are actually good and right.

[Zenophilious]

Good.  Gawker is terrible company and I wish they'd die.  I don't like Hulk Hogan either, but at least he doesn't leak sex tapes and take the moral high horse after doing so.  Now we just need Buzzfeed to do something as monumentally stupid as refusing to take down Hogan's sex tape, and the world will be a much nicer place.

[solidbatman]

It wouldn't shock me to see individual Gawker properties get sold off. A site like Kotaku, for example, would be a decent buy for a media company looking to get their grubby hands into gaming news. 

[Keinart]

And nothing of value was lost.

[Chronopolis]

I don't understand how they got sued for one HUNDRED million dollars. What makes him worth that much? I could see a 'take it down or we'll legally shut down your company", but this kind of compensation is ridiculous. Fucking legal system. I'm all for sites like gawker going away, but there's a million double standards.  It seems like he made a convincing case and played the legal system, and convinced the jury to legally vaporize the company off the face of the planet. /rant.

[Valmore]

It seems juries are really hitting the prize up button on. Erin Andrews got $55 million. Hulk Hogan gets $115 million.

At least Jared got beat up in prison.

[Down]

How the fuck do you even get sued for 115 MILLION DOLLARS for a personal case like that? What the holy fuck is wrong with this legal system?

Anyway... I only know Kotaku through their immensely bad anime articles but I'd rather not see them disappear, it would be way too pleasing for Gamergatards.

[Nosebleed]

I'm pretty sure a huge part of the problem lied in the fact Gawker refused to comply with a direct court order, which aggravated everything for their case. Not that you can't make a justification for not complying with a court order (See the Apple debacle), but I'm pretty sure a personal privacy case like this should be clear enough.

This amount of money is quite a sum, but it'll probably get appealled and reduced. I've always thought fines never really made any sense or follow any kind of logic, it always feels like the juries just go "so, uh, how much money do we go for this time?" and then roll a dice, which is pretty scary in its own right.

I honestly have 0 sympathy for Gawker and its clones, even if some of them are better than others, so I don't think anything would be lost if they were gone.
I want to remind you the editor-in-chief at Gawker said, in court, that they'd draw the line at "posting the sex tape of a celebrity who is under 4 years old", which is quite an appalling thing to say in a trial (and no, I don't care if it was a repeated question, it's still absolutely disgusting).
These guys are proud of their shitty attitudes and brag about it whenever they can, no matter where they are. They are as cancerous as internet cancer can be.
I would put my hands in the dirt if their rights were actually being violated, but that's not the case here, so I can't say I feel bad for them.

[Decay]

2 hours ago, Down said:

How the fuck do you even get sued for 115 MILLION DOLLARS for a personal case like that? What the holy fuck is wrong with this legal system?

Anyway... I only know Kotaku through their immensely bad anime articles but I'd rather not see them disappear, it would be way too pleasing for Gamergatards.

It's already pleasing for them. For reasons I can't really comprehend, they're taking credit for victory in this case.

 

Everything about this is sad.

[Darklord Rooke]

7 minutes ago, Decay said:

It's already pleasing for them. For reasons I can't really comprehend, they're taking credit for victory in this case.

Everything about this is sad.

GamerGate is everything wrong with modern youths morals and expectations of what they're entitled to wrapped up in one disgusting package. The way they react to stuff they don't agree with, the way they react to confrontation, basically the way they react in general is disappointing. Most of them need to grow up, to be honest.

3 hours ago, Down said:

How the fuck do you even get sued for 115 MILLION DOLLARS for a personal case like that? What the holy fuck is wrong with this legal system?

Heh, not 115 million. He's gonna get a lot more then that once they finish counting damages  

[Funyarinpa]

Gawker is a piece of fucking shit that can easily go fuck themselves. No sympathy for the company itself, but it's bad in the sense that it will make some people jobless. I hope the people who aren't the clickbaiter hypocrites in the Gawker network will be able to find a job very quickly. I also hear Hogan is a sexist and homophobic asshole, but that doesn't justify such a deep violation of privacy as publication of a sex tape.

[Down]

2 hours ago, Rooke said:

GamerGate is everything wrong with modern youths morals and expectations of what they're entitled to wrapped up in one disgusting package. The way they react to stuff they don't agree with, the way they react to confrontation, basically the way they react in general is disappointing. Most of them need to grow up, to be honest.

I definitely don't agree with the reduction of Gamergate to "modern youths morals"; Gamergate is a reactionary movement sharing ideologies close to extreme-right, it's not a very "youth" thing: you could find similar reactionary movement full of old people.

You can't really reduce it to immaturity either. Similarly to other groups of that kind they're well organized, use recurrent tactics (for their harassment campaigns), have a strategy of saturating the public space with their misinformation to force their ideologies to weight into any debate regarding video games and the vg community (making it impossible to have a reasonable discussion on those topics).

It's a real, huge thorn in the foot of the video game community which, in my opinion, has become irreducible to a simple trend among youths who need to mature.

[KuroganeHomura]

6 hours ago, Down said:

How the fuck do you even get sued for 115 MILLION DOLLARS for a personal case like that? What the holy fuck is wrong with this legal system?

At least from a certain point of view it makes sense. Suppose there was a cap of 10k (or 100k or a million). In that case, it becomes possible to weigh the gains you expect from breaking the law with the money you stand to lose. Meaning if you just have enough money, you can completely ignore that particular law if you think it's gonna make you enough money to be worth it (and happen to be an asshole).

 

3 hours ago, Nosebleed said:

I would put my hands in the dirt if their rights were actually being violated, but that's not the case here, so I can't say I feel bad for them.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. There are possible limits to what kind of private information you can make public about someone without their consent, but the 1st doesn't have a general exception like "doesn't apply when someone's privacy is violated by the speech in question". Which makes sense if you consider that functionally, there's no difference between this case and a case where a politician gets recorded saying some less than agreeable things in private. I'm pretty sure you'll agree that the latter should be legal to be published. If you do, any general exception to publishing private material would have a big problem - namely, where to draw the line and who gets to decide where to draw it. Is it "if it's a person of public interest" and/or "if the material in question is of public interest"? If so, then how exactly do you define those two? No matter how you do it, you'll end up with a pretty vague line. Which means anyone thinking of publishing something that would still be legal to publish even with that sort of exception in place, but just barely, would think twice about doing it. Kind of similar to the obscenity exception to the 1st in general, incidentally. I could really do without the latter and I think I'd rather not get the former, either, even if it may lead to some rather ugly results like in this case.

[Funyarinpa]

^Well unless your booty call always has to include matters of public interest I don't really think it is possible to justify a sex tape's publication 

[Down]

35 minutes ago, KuroganeHomura said:

At least from a certain point of view it makes sense. Suppose there was a cap of 10k (or 100k or a million). In that case, it becomes possible to weigh the gains you expect from breaking the law with the money you stand to lose. Meaning if you just have enough money, you can completely ignore that particular law if you think it's gonna make you enough money to be worth it (and happen to be an asshole).

I didn't mean there should be caps, but that this showcases some of the absurdity of some justice systems. The mantra here is that justice seeks to evaluate the financial "worth" of a wrongdoing made against a victim and use that as compensation. It should already be perfectly obvious that there are lots of things on which you can't possibly put a financial value and thus that the very principle is stupid.

For example, in this case, they explain that they calculated about half of the compensation by estimating how much could Hogan have made if he had sold the tape by himself. That's utterly retarded and borderline insulting for the victim.