Techdirt's First Amendment Fight for Its Life
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Basically, our society has ended up in a place that you can sue anyone you want out of business as long as your lawyer team is bigger and better than theirs, despite how ridiculous or wrong your claims are.
I think the solution hinges on very large punitive damages for offending parties who sue for no reason and lose, e.g. in this case suing a magazine over "I invented email and you can't say that I didn't, give me $15M" should result in the accuser having to pay $15M himself because the claim is obviously a lie, and the intent of the lawsuit is not to be proven right but to harm the defendant.
Though it opens up a very slippery slope, and I would hope it would have damn high standards for proving malicious intent.
-- As you point out, resorting to the legal system should at most be criminalized only in the most extreme instances of abuse.
-- Those extreme instances aren't the hardest problem to solve, because the legal system already knows how to dispose of OBVIOUS nonsense.
-- Any apparent counterexample to my assertions would probably already be covered by other criminal statutes, such as those pertaining to perjury.