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The Courts Government News Your Rights Online

Web Site Sues Annoying Pest Troll 386

Posted by timothy from the not-not-this-web-site dept.
kongjie writes "Cleveland's The Plain Dealer has a story in the business section about a pest-control web site that is suing someone who obviously has a particular bone to pick with exterminators: he is accused of being a "troll" who "constantly leaving obnoxious and offensive messages" on their pest-control bulletin board. The suit is for $5,000 and is for "violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.""
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Web Site Sues Annoying Pest Troll More

Web Site Sues Annoying Pest Troll

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  • Let's hope this never happens here! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:00PM (#5108883)
    I can see Slashdot's new business model...

  • Watch out slashdot trolls!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:01PM (#5108899) Journal
    You might be next...

    (just kidding...)

  • Man, a lot of you people are in some serious trouble!

    Go get 'em, Taco !

  • Are you not entertained? (Score:4, Funny)

    by DasAlbatross ( 633390 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:04PM (#5108919)
    I think sterner measures need to be taken. Such as having spammers and trolls fight to the death in a pit for our amusement.
  • $5,000 per troll?

    With that kind of money Taco could buy MS and convert the whole operation to Linux :)

  • That you've resorted to trolling a pest-control web site?
    • That you've resorted to trolling a geek news web site?
      • Realistically, it's easier to troll (note: troll, not crapflood) a site frequented by the extremists: linux zealots make easy targets. Similarly, it's very easy to troll political discussion boards, and unsuspecting teenagers.

        Crapflooding, however, is not trolling, and takes no skill. It is absolutely immaterial what type of site you crapflood: some people will anger easier, but it's usually only a matter of time until you get bored and move on anyway.
    • I participate in an IRC channel for people on the Autistic-spectrum, we have a troll who has made it his life's mission to evade bans and harrass us. I simply cannot fathom WHY someone would find pleasure in this, but he does.

      Pathetic human behavior has no bottom

  • I don't care how annoying/offensive someone is... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by still_sick ( 585332 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:08PM (#5108946)
    Being a jerk shouldn't be illegal / a suable thing.
    • Is it possible that the website owners are not as much interested in winning a lawsuit as they are getting this guy to stop interfering with their business? I'd bet they're hoping to settle out of court. Apologize and leave us alone, and we'll drop the case against you.
      • Certainly you're right. But it's not the fact that they're suing "for money" that bothers me, what else can you sue for? What bothers me is that they're suing at all.
        • What if the troll post offesive words on his site and a potential customer saw the message and stop doing business with him? Some little old lady might not understand that the BBS can't be monitored 24/7. She would simply be offended and blame the owner.

          "How could you let that filth be on your website."

          Also the extra time and effort required to remove said Troll was costing the guy money as well.

          If the guy spray painted the store or broke a window would he not be expected to pay damages? How is this different?

    • So then I assume for consistency's sake that you support the right of any person or business to send unsolicited email to anyone they want to? That's fine if you do, but if you oppose spam or support spam prevention laws, this is essentially the same situation.

  • No public space? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GMFTatsujin ( 239569 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:09PM (#5108951) Homepage
    "It sounds in part that this [lawsuit] highlights the lack of public spaces on the Internet," Seltzer said. "I would be more comfortable saying they could kick off whoever they wanted if there was someplace else they could tell him to go."

    He doesn't get out much, does he?

    When you open your site up to anyone, and make the process of getting an account public and easily accessable, you've just created a public space. The vast majority of web-based message boards are this way. No identity verification, no scrutinized application process, no requirements (except possibly vowing that you're over 18). The act of getting an account on these boards is almost totally geared toward providing a constant on-line identity in the forums, but it has nothing to do with who you are in meatspace.

    That being said, I'm fine with this lawsuit. It takes money and resources to create such a forum, even if it's free to use. I'm posting on Slashdot's dime right now, in fact.

    There are plenty of places for boneheads to go. Selzer's particular place has been targetted for asshole bombardment, and that sucks.

    Maybe he should implement a Karma scheme? :)
    GMFTatsujin
    • Selzer's particular place has been targetted for asshole bombardment, and that sucks.

      Miss Selzer [seltzer.org] is a lawyer for the EFF [eff.org]. She also created the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse [chillingeffects.org]. As far as I know, she has no relation to the pest-control website. She was simply interviewed for the story.

      She was commenting that most web forums are privately owned, so if this ruling stands, trolls can be kicked off virtually any website. Note, she didn't actually take a stance on the case, she simply suggested she was uncomfortable with it.

    • Re:No public space? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by elsilver ( 85140 )
      Sorry, what you are describing is not public space, like a sidewalk, but private-space-open-to-the-public, much like a shopping mall.

      If you check (and naturally I'm to lazy to do it right now), you'll find that what a person can say/do in a private-public space is not as wide as in a true public space. If I were a mall owner, I'd be able to do things like kick people out who were begging, wearing gang colors (as a /. article from a while ago discussed, IIRC), bad-mouthing my mall or tennants, or just not shopping.

      Similarly, if I put up a website and open it up to the public, I should be able to kick off people who are behaving in a way I disagree with. It's my web site after all.

      However, given that, Seltzer still has a strong point -- where are the true public spaces in cyberspace? Are government hosted discussion forums the same as public property? (I'm not sure but I think that there are also varying degrees of public spaces -- protesting inside City Hall is different from protesting on the lawn outside.) If a gov't forum and public property aren't the same, then have we built ourselves a new world without public spaces? Is every sidewalk and park in cyberspace owned by some corporation or organization? How do we find/build true public spaces?

      I don't know.

      elsilver.
      • There's still a variety of things you can't do - there are some responsibilities that come with the creation of a public space (yes, it's a public space, no it's a publicly owned space). There's been a variety of 1st amendment cases, for example.

        Not that they can't ban him. And I would say that repeated attempts to avoid the ban would be considered a form of harrasment, and thus actionable. And 5 grand is actually a quite reasonable amount of money in a suite like this (No amazingly inflated claims of the amount of money they might have made), so I'm not totally against them.

    • He doesn't get out much, does he? ... There are plenty of places for boneheads to go.

      I'll ignore your bad attitude towards newbies and try not to hurt you. =:>

      I'm happy to see disruptive people thrown off, and so is Selzer. Selzer, however, sees this being a problem with other more disturbing internet trends of consolidation and active control of content.

      The worry is that there are no places that are NOT under someone else's thumb. Most ISPs are implementing policies like this and all the large ones prevent you from running your own web site with your own equipment. This is a problem that's larger than trolls. People with unpopular oppinions may find themselves without a place to voice that oppinion very soon. Do you think AOL would let you run a rotten.com? Do you think MSN would let you run a klan site? How about the Free Software Foundation? Right now M$ spends billions of dollars a year discrediting their "competition", we can be sure they would consider the FSF a troll if the FSF lost it's ability to peer. The internet IS a public network because it uses public grounds and servitudes. The root cause of the problem is that ISPs are being regulated less as common carriers and more as some kind of net nanny.

    • EFF's Seltzer Misses The Point Badly (Score:4, Interesting)

      by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @08:06PM (#5110502) Journal
      I was surprised to see a comment this mistaken from the EFF. Yes, there are lots of private spaces on the Internet, and if you don't like the ones that are there, you can build your own, because unlike the radio/tv broadcast spectrum, which is nationalized in most countries, either for government use or for use by officially permitted oligopolies, the Internet *is* free public space. You can get any domain name that isn't currently in use, and if you want to be http://www.pest-control-troll.org, the name's available. You can connect to anywhere on the internet, and anybody who wants to can connect to you. The internet originally didn't _have_ public space on it - it was all government-controlled - but the Commercial Internet Exchange and its successors changed that, and some of the EFF's founders were important participants in that. The public space depends on cooperation of everybody who wants to participate in it - if you don't like it, you can go start your own Arpanet over on 10.x.x.x and only invite your friends, or go hide on 127.0.0.1 and not invite anybody, but if you want a richer and more interesting public space, you have to build more of it and invite the public in, because that't how things get built around here. Telling other people that you don't like the gift horse they've given the public isn't the way to get it.

      The existence of public space doesn't mean that anybody's obligated to show up at your web site and listen to you, or that anybody's SMTP server is obligated to accept your requests to connect to their Port 25*, any more than the existence of public parks and legality of soapboxes means that anybody's obligated to stick around and listen to you rant about space aliens' plots to destroy us all with volcanoes, but if you've gotten thrown out of the pub because you were rudely yelling at everybody about why they should buy canned meat from you, the commons and the high seas are still public space. The internet works through cooperation, and if nobody wants to cooperate with you because you won't cooperate with them, well, perhaps their lives are drearier for it, or perhaps not.

      There are ways in which private groups are trying to take over public space. Various proposals for "internet drivers' licenses" and various governments' restrictions on their citizens' free speech and freedom to read are obvious examples. Australia's attempts to extend local defamation law around the world are especially disturbing, given the number of regimes that make "defaming the state" illegal. ICANN's main objective seems to be to assert trademark-owners' control over the namespace, and secondarily to make sure that some service providers always make money on namespace, rather than to provide technical management and high-quality implementations. You can see this especially in their insistence that registrars get your True Name and True Subpoena-Delivery Address for whois records and publish them, rather than insisting that your Technical and Administrative email addresses go somewhere that doesn't bounce and maybe even get a human to respond. Some big ISPs periodically try to attract customers to a Walled Garden that doesn't really access the full Internet, and the market gradually tells them that people want more than that - that's why AOL now lets you fetch real web pages as well as AOL-provided content, and cellphone WAP systems aren't getting the respect their purveyors expected, so they're trying to find better ways to get real Internet content and not just newswires. The cable modem companies are the big exceptions right now, by trying to prevent their users from running "servers" from home (there were initially some technical reasons for this, but it was always basically the fear that they might not be in control.) That hasn't killed them all yet, though @Home's really dead, and their quasi-monopoly status and TV-content-pusher background has made it take longer for them to realize that they need active users to generate interesting content and develop the Killer Apps that will make everybody else buy cable modem, but they'll get there. The kinds of people who want to tell Google how to rank their pages because everybody uses Google to search the web are another example, not realizing that the reason that everybody uses Google is *because* of the way they rank their pages, and if they want to have a "politically correct web search ranking" system, which is really just an outlet for their own speech and ideas, they should use the Internet's public-space capability, set out their own soapbox with a big "politically correct searches here" sign over it, and hope the public shows up.

      * There's a corrolary to Godwin's Law which says that all discussions that don't trigger the primary form of it will eventually devolve into discussions about spam.... But then Godwin also used to be an EFF lawyer...

  • Maybe it'll help, but I doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mgkimsal2 ( 200677 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:09PM (#5108956) Homepage
    I've run message boards in the past - there are always a few bad apples, and I inevitably got/get others saying

    "I'm on board X (running software Y) and they just ban someone - you're stupid cause you can't ban someone."

    I try to stress to people you CAN NOT ban someone technically in forums on the internet. Well, not easily. Certainly without putting up roadblocks which just annoy the rest of the people.

    What can you do?

    1. Require username/password - unless these are paid for, it's hard to stop people from registering

    2. Require a reply to email (or click on a link) to verify an email address. Big deal - so I know you know how to open a hotmail account.

    3. Track IPs and ban on that - great, except for people on dialups, or shared systems, or mobile people.

    4. Require moderators to review and approve all posts before they go out. Most reliable, but requires increasing staff time/cost as traffic grows.

    There is NO foolproof way to stop this sort of stuff. I hope this suit sends a message to those trolls who waste/abuse resources and do not heed polite requests to play by the rules the rest of us follow.

    I'm normally not in favor of legal tactics, and generally favor technical answers to technical problems, but this isn't a technical problem. It's a behavioural one, and we have a legal system in place to deal with bad/wrong/illegal behaviour.

    • Re:Maybe it'll help, but I doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by henben ( 578800 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @04:03PM (#5109246)
      The simple solution is to have a special "troll" flag on accounts. When someone is flagged as a troll, they can post as normal, but *only they can see their posts*.

      Hopefully, they will think they're being ignored and go away. Even if not, it means they aren't sure when to reregister.

  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Amsterdam Vallon ( 639622 ) <amsterdamvallon2003@yahoo.com> on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:10PM (#5108962) Homepage
    Jon Katz, a freelance writer and dog enthusiast, was arrested and jailed with no bail for attempting to delete an old work of his [slashdot.org] that falls under the new anti-troll act.

    If found guilty, his punishment could range anywhere from a fine of $500 to a sentence of 2 years of jail time during which he would be forced to read his old Slashdot articles 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, until released.

  • new slashdot business model, step 2 filled in (Score:4, Funny)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:12PM (#5108975) Homepage Journal
    1. build popular website, attracting many thousands of trolls
    2. sue trolls, total=$5k*(number of trolls)
    3. profit!!!

  • Simple Solution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by limekiller4 ( 451497 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:16PM (#5109004) Homepage
    I don't think the people behind this suit are particularly adept. Block the IP. If that doesn't do it contact their provider. If that doesn't work start blocking the whole IP range owned by that person's ISP.

    If the guy has to find a whole new ISP just to post a message that will be killed by a moderator in a few hours he's not going to be doing it for long.

    The only way I can see this not being a good idea is if the ISP in question is sufficiently large AND sufficiently unresponsive to your complaints, but I don't see that as being the case here. I think they're spending a whole lotta money on something they're going to lose anyway.
    • So you think the guy wouldn't sue his ISP for revoking his account because of someone's complaint?

      If the ISP wouldn't do it for fear of a lawsuit, then blocking based on IP just hurts more people than this one guy. If the ISP *would* take on the lawsuit, that means there's merit, and there are legal grounds to go after this guy. If there are legal grounds, let the pest company go after him directly.
      • mgkimsal2 writes:
        " So you think the guy wouldn't sue his ISP for revoking his account because of someone's complaint? If the ISP wouldn't do it for fear of a lawsuit, then blocking based on IP just hurts more people than this one guy. If the ISP *would* take on the lawsuit, that means there's merit, and there are legal grounds to go after this guy. If there are legal grounds, let the pest company go after him directly."

        Good points. I would suggest that there likely exists a ToS (Terms of Service) which he is in violation of. But granted, the ISP might very well wish to take a neutral stance for fear of a lawsuit.

        My only real objection to your answer is that simple technical measures don't appear to have been tried yet and they should.
        • We don't know all of what's gone on. They may very well have been tried. I'd imagine they'd contacted his ISP to at least get his contact info to serve papers. The site seems to be an industry association of some type - perhaps the membership didn't want to go through all the extra hoops themselves just to stop one person, and felt that a lawsuit was a more prudent use of funds.

    • Not so simple! Most ISP's outsource dialup to fairly large providers. So, a business that WANTS people to be able to get to it's site should block 10% of them (or more, depending on the troll's ISP) just to get rid of one unreasonable person?

      Dialup service good enough to get to a web board is a dime a dozen, and all you need is a credit card. It can be as cheap as $9/month. About all they can do is close the account. They'll probably give him his money back just to avoid trouble. The next day, he'll just pick another ISP and give them the money he just got refunded. You have to remember, if the troll could be expected to behave reasonably, he wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

  • From the article: " GIE is alleging trespassing, breach of contract and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It is seeking at least $5,000 from Huckaby. The company also wants the judge to bar him from visiting PCT Online."

    While the plaintiffs case may very well have merits, based on the TOS nearly every website has (and if not, there are still remedies), the fact remains that in this case, as in so many others I have seen, the ruling, if granted in favor of the plaintiffs (GIE, et. al.) will have little real effect. Everyone knows what happens when you feed the trolls. That is exactly what they thrive on. Further, the defendant (Huckaby) can stall the case for years, run up a huge bill for GIE, and still keep it up. If he is not in violation of any criminal statutes, then he can pretty much keep trolling, and there is little the Courts can do.

    It is, then, a question of technology.

    Drink, Be Merry, Blame the Beergut on Your Genes [xnewswire.com]

  • As Seltzer said, it is not an issue of a message board being a public place.


    You could consider websites more like a store or mall. That you are given an implied invitation to visit as long as you comply with their rules, if the rules are not illegal, discriminitory, and unreasonable.


    This is a case where this person was told to leave, then came back using other names. The McDonalds manager could ask you to leave if you are sleeping on the table after eating your Taco Bell dinner and if you don't leave, the manager could have you arrested for tresspassing. You could be required not to take pictures in an establishment, as part of the rules of entry is not to take pictures -- even if it does not violate copyright.


    Just because there is no bolted door on the front and there is a public sidewalk attached does not mean you can go into and do anything you want.

  • ...not for being a troll but for being a moron. So he's harassing a website where he has left his true data?

    Sue the hell out of him
  • Wait a minute . . . that's bad for me.
  • I think this is a cut and dry case of a company prematurely jumping into a matter whole, hog.

    Any system or forum administrator worth his salt could easily block a range of IP addresses as well as some of the more popular proxy servers that allow deviant trolls to sneak through and continue posting.

    Just look at Slashdot and Kuro5hin. Rob and Rusty both, respectfully, understand the dynamics of Web communities and know that court isn't how to solve trivial little troll problems. All you do is give a person a very friendly time out period during which they can't post and you're home free.

    The problem here is not trolls or Internet arguers. The problem here is talent, and this pest control company doesn't have anyone in their IT department with half a brain.

    K5 and Slash are still running strong through years of low budgets, high troll/contributor ratios, and Dot Com busts. It's not rocket scientry, folks, it's just simple, kind administration on the part of Rusty and Rob Malda.

    • Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mgkimsal2 ( 200677 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:36PM (#5109117) Homepage
      They've simply refused to put themselves in a constantly reactive state. They are taking some action to establish a precedent that you must abide by their TOS, or face REAL consequences, not simply 'you can't post for 2 hours' or some other slap on the wrist.

      PCT seems to be an association or industry portal of some sort - they're servicing a number of pest control companies. Their forum users aren't there to get into popularity contests with 'friends/foes' and moderation totals and all that crap - they're there to exchange business information. Other 'social engineering' answers simply burden the rest of the users who are abiding by the rules.

      Block by IP and you potentially block other members. Require moderator approvals and you lose the 'real time' aspect of the forum.

      IT people want to look for technical solutions to this because it keeps them in a position of power. If this lawsuit is successful, you won't have to rely on your IT people as much to keep a lid on technical problems. There will hopefully be one more precedent which establishes that 'stop' means 'stop', and there will be a financial penalty for failing to comply.

  • It's about time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Cyclometh ( 629276 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:48PM (#5109174)

    That someone started taking these irresponsible cretins to task. I applaud this action. For anyone who wants to cry "free speach", it should be noted that the server, bulletin board, and services involved were totally private in nature. That, and this twonk had to get through some kind of agreement prohibitig such behavior in order to gain access. I'm constantly amazed that people seem to think that because a forum is on the Internet that it somehow enjoys some additional protections covering anything you want to say. If you own the equipment, you get to decide what gets done with it, and who can use it.

  • Have a look at the messageboard [pctonline.com]. This guy is a troll in the true Slashdot style: random profanity, multiple accounts, and goatse.cx links.

    By the way, regarding the latte: if you follow the above link, do not click on the post with subject line "Do you recognize this insect?".
  • That's ok, I'm fearless.

    First post!!!!!

  • Be careful what you post on this thread. There is some seriously [slashdot.org] unfair [slashdot.org] moderation going on.

    It seems that many moderators are confusing the power of a webmaster with the freedom to speak.

  • I want a new mod option, "Sue for Trolling". When can this be implemented? I can accept the money through PayPal or a Swiss bank account.

  • Ah trolls. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Second_Derivative ( 257815 )
    There's good trolls and there's bad trolls. As a slashdot reader I find some funny. As a messageboard administrator, I hope they make an example out of this guy, would save me a shitload of hassle. One troll I've dealt with repeatedly posted personal attacks against various members of several forums I admin at, did everything he could to piss off as many people as possible (it's a site about a game series so basically he posted spoilers absolutely everywhere), then after being banned registered a slew of accounts and flooded the general discussion forum with crap. Having cleared that up and banned the source IPs he then used about fifty different open proxies to slip around -- got to the point where I just customized the forums to send me a message over Jabber every time someone registered and let me watch their first steps then decide whether or not it's a troll; I'm sure I roasted more than one account as a false positive. That's not counting the personal attacks on me and my AIM getting flooded with crap, as well as impersonations of me and various others on AIM and IRC or whatever; social-engineered an admin password off another site I go to this way and then deleted the entire database.

    I dunno what's worse; the trolls or the fact that there's an ever growing number of people at the site who find him hilarious and egg him on. Though they're a minority, most people quite publicly think he's a twat. He's stopped attacking forums but continues to infest IRC.

    To cut a long story short then, there are some sad, sad individuals like this, and someone or other always has to deal with them. The more people like this get publicly and painfully burned, the better. It's all fun and games until you really make it your mission to just piss everyone off.

  • Infantilism (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tuxlove ( 316502 )
    This guy is an idiot who deserves to lose in court. If someone wants to run a message board purely for exterminators to discuss their occupational issues, that's their right. If some idiot won't adhere to their use policy and repeatedly tries to interfere with their site, it's their right to boot him. Technical and legal means are both valid ways of doing this. The latter is valid, IMHO, because it's a much more powerful deterrent, and detracts less from the webmaster's daily work. Even /. can't keep the trolls away through technical means w/o crippling the site in unpleasant ways.

    Of course, having posted this story here, the /. folks have cause a horde of infantile nerdlings to bombard the pest control message board with goatse photos and the like. I feel sorry for them - both the message board people and the idiot trolls (or crapflooders, rather) bombarding the site, though for different reasons.

  • I just thought of something... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @05:53PM (#5109891) Homepage Journal
    ...since this got posted on /., this board is going to get attacked by a whole army of crapflooders. Maybe this story should have not gotten through the submission process...if the poor devils who run the board think they had troubles with this one guy, just wait.
    • I sent this story to Slashdot because I thought it was interesting and relevant; this was my first story submission although I've been reading parts of the site for a couple of months. Since the story was in a regional paper, the business section to boot, I didn't think too many nerds would have spotted it. Right now, though, after looking at what has been posted on the board, I regret sending it in. This is a community of people engaged in an activity who use a board to learn more about their profession and to communicate with other souls. Personally, mass extermination of pests is not something I advocate. But I think that legal questions aside, the flooding of the board with obscenities is, putting it mildly, unkind. If their suit violates first amendment rights, it will fail in the courts. Bombing the board with crap achieves no positive goal.

  • IN SOVIET RUSSIA... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lethyos ( 408045 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @08:56PM (#5110699) Journal
    Trolls sue YOU!

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