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Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny that big corporations routinely bully small players into submission through these bogus legal shenanigans, but when Peter Thiel bankrolled a private individual in a legitimate, bonafide court case against a big media corporation, many people had ethical issues with it.

How is an individual with limited resources (money and time) supposed to ever hold their ground against $BIG_CORP?

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"Big media corporation" is an exaggeration in that case. Peter Thiel's personal wealth is such that he could have bought out Gawker dozens of times over if it had been a publicly traded company. Gawker actually settled because THEY ("$BIG_CORP") lacked the resources to fight through the whole process, and decided to cut their losses.

Yeah but Hulk Hogan (who is admittedly rich but maybe not fuck-you rich) was the plaintiff. Not Thiel.

And you are only proving my point. In most cases, individuals are the ones forced to settle with corporations because they don't have the resources to fight corps.

The same would have happened with Hulk Hogan if he had not been bankrolled by Thiel.

So, if anything, it was Thiel's actions that tipped the balance in the direction of the individual, who, mind you, was entirely in the right in this particular case.

It's almost as though we can take that particular example in context, rather than mindlessly calculating which side has more money and then crafting arguments against their case.

People object to bags of money winning court cases and to rich assholes turning their riches into an unfair share of power, via courts or otherwise. No contradiction here.

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