Angry, Threatening Lawyer Fails To Sue As Promised, Drops His SLAPP Suit
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A couple weeks back we wrote about the somewhat odd decision making of an angry lawyer named Jason Lee Van Dyke, whom we'd also written about years ago for some spectacularly bad lawyering. This year he's also gotten really really pissed off at three (very different) people: Ken White, Asher Langton and Talib Kweli. The first two have appeared on Techdirt many times. Ken is a criminal defense and First Amendment lawyer. Asher has an astounding ability to sniff out frauds online. And Talib is a musical genius among other things. But, Van Dyke has spent months angrily lashing out about them on the internet (well, the lashing out at Kweli was more recent).When we last checked in on him, he was threatening to add those three individuals -- plus the Huffington Post -- to a fairly obvious SLAPP suit that he had already filed in Texas against an Ohio-based publication called the Mockingbird. Lots of people had pointed out that Texas has a fairly robust anti-SLAPP law, which could lead to Van Dyke having to pay up -- and Van Dyke's response (not atypical from his earlier responses) was to lash out and threaten more lawsuits and to promise violence if he was sanctioned.He then went so far as to contact Mockingbird's lawyer to ask for leave to amend the existing lawsuit with the three individuals mentioned above, plus the Huffington Post (which had also written about the lawsuit).So... despite the promises to add more names to the lawsuit, that didn't happen. And despite the claims that he was going to just keep fighting the lawsuit... a few days later, Van Dyke agreed to dismiss the suit with prejudice, and the judge agreed. Gerry Bello at Mockingbird has a post on this as well, which reveals that Van Dyke told Bello's lawyer that the reason for the dismissal was that his "immediate supervisor at the company where I am employed" had "instructed" Van Dyke to dismiss the case. It is not clear where Van Dyke is currently employed or who told him to do this. Van Dyke has generally held himself out as being self-employed as a lawyer.One hopes that this is actually Van Dyke recognizing that repeated threats of both violence and lawsuits against critics is not a particularly wise idea. I'm not holding my breath that this is the case, however. In the meantime, we've heard from others that various bar complaints have been filed against Van Dyke, and given his actions and statements, at the very least you have to wonder how much longer he'll be able to practice law, no matter who "employs" him.
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posted at: 12:01am on 05-Dec-2017
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Top EU Privacy Campaigner Says He Wants Lots Of Money For 'None Of Your Business'
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We've just written about the Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, and his continuing battle with Facebook. But it seems Schrems now wants to take things up a notch. He's hoping to found a new privacy organization called the "European Center for Digital Rights", with the domain name of noyb.eu - "none of your business":The focus of noyb will be on commercial data processing by corporations. Corporate practices are rarely transparent. Internet users are commonly confronted with unlawful practices, agreements and terms and conditions. Their data is linked and sold behind the back of these consumers. Phenomena like big data, profiling and selective targeting are common practice today and will only grow in the future. Noyb's weapon of choice will be a new EU privacy law:In May 2018, the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force. It includes massive improvements in the area of privacy enforcement for users. NGOs like noyb will be able to directly take actions for consumers with the relevant authorities and in court, e.g. through class action suits or strategic group action. It's not all legal actions. Noyb also plans to publish guidelines and best practices to give advice to businesses on how to follow the new GDPR rules to avoid being sued. It also plans to create new digital tools for privacy complaints and privacy inquiries, as well as whistleblowing tools. In the short term, these are some possible goals (pdf):TECHNICAL: Testing Environment for Apps. As an initial technical research project the organization could review the actual data use by the most popular smartphone apps and thereby develop a testing environment for consistent testing of apps. Existing research have e.g. shown that some apps access GPS locations or contacts beyond what is strictly necessary for the function used [an important aspect of the GDPR]. The generated evidence could lead to rankings, complaints or legal procedures.LEGAL: Smartphone Operating Systems. Apple and Google dominate the smartphone market. Their policies are based on a "take it or leave it" basis and allow these companies significant access to the most personal device of most consumers. Enforcement actions in this area could have a substantial impact in the daily life of almost every citizen. By the end of 2018 noyb hopes to have achieved the following:Cooperation with at least five major privacy NGOs, five consumer rights organizations, five universities or research institutions and five hacker institutions/spaces.Basic network of lawyers at least in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg and the US.Support of 10 small external enforcement actions through the enforcement fund. In the long-term, it has even more ambitious plans. For example, widening the scope of the noyb organization from privacy to other digital rights such as net neutrality, or related consumer rights, and to set up national NGOs in countries that currently lack local initiatives. Of course, this all requires money. Noyb estimates that it needs a minimum of €250,000 in the start-up period of 2018, while the regular operating costs will be around €500,000 per year. It is hoping a combination of sponsorship and crowdfunding will provide those amounts.Raising money will probably be the organization's biggest challenge. After all, Schrems has shown more than once that he can take on the biggest Internet companies and win. As with those victories, it's important to note that the legal framework that noyb intends to use may be purely European, but the global nature of the Internet and the companies that serve it means the impacts of any successful legal actions are likely to be felt worldwide.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
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