Where exactly is the line between slander and freedom of speech?
It stops when someone rights up and harrasses them for an hour on the phone, and when they hang up, immediately call again.
It stops when it causes a person to leave work and go home in tears because of that harrassment.
It stops when that person continually rings up the secretary of the head of places like NIST and NSF and harrasses them for hours on end trying to get though to the director.
It stops when they post lies to public forums like usenet saying that someone has already been convicted of a crime and is going to jail soon (that's funny, I don't even remember a court case, and no policeman has been knocking on my door asking to see me).
It stops when the person spends their entire time fabricating evidence with the sole intent of trying to destroy a person's company or get them sacked from their job.
It stops when the person continually accuses another of commiting crimes when there is no evidence to, nor any intention to start a lawsuit over it.
Inability to do anything marginally technically oriented to the subject at hand is irrelevant at this point.
doesn't the international nature of internet newsgroups make it difficult to prosecute?
No, in fact it makes it a hell of a lot easier. If I was still living in Australia, he would have been prosecuted and fined very large sums of money by now. People with far lesser cases for doing very similar things have been fined tens of millions of dollars in Australia.
I have seen lots of flame wars over the years (and this is one of them)
This is not a flame war. Wake up and smell the coffee. We have an individual who has very, very serious mental issues that is deliberately out to destroy companies and harass people. A flame war does not have someone phoning up the targets and verbally abusing them for hours on end and when the target tries to get rid of them by hanging up, have him call back immediately. This is not a joke. Go send an email to Patti Koenig, Julian Gomez or Sandy Ressler to get confirmation. Patti is in a meeting right now with her boss to explain what is going on.
I personally think the thing to do is ignore the lunatics.
We are. This was the last message to publically tell him to quit making false accusations. Its the last necessary step in the legal paperwork trail needed to initiate libel and harassment lawsuits. He has been warned first, without legal letterheads. Should he post again such material, the next action will be a cease and desist letter arriving on his doorstep. Should it continue past that, then the courts get involved.
You may not care, nor may I, but the management of big places like NIST and NASA do take the rantings of this guy seriously as doing harm to their reputation when not justified.
-- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant -------------------------------------------------------------------
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