Craigslist Prankster Sued

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/05/1351217

"Though Sunday's New York Times dubbed him a spokesperson for internet trolls, Jason Fortuny's just been sued in federal court. Fortuny re-published over 180 responses to a fake sex ad on Craigslist in 2006 — but he's finally been located and issued with a summons. The victim argues Fortuny violated his privacy, and that the photo Fortuny re-published was copyrighted. Fortuny argues he re-published the photo to stand up to the victim's bogus DMCA notice, and that the gullible victim had voluntarily provided the photo. In a motion to the court Fortuny even argues that he helped publicize a privacy risk on the internet, whereas 'bringing legal action against me may punish me, but it won't change or even impact online culture.'"



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I, for one, find the experiment to be pretty interesting. In this day and age, with all of the sexual diseases and access to so much information on people via the internet...you would think that there wouldn't be that many people jumping at the chance to hit up some slut they've never even SEEN much less met via the internet. In that hand, I would totally support this sort of experiment in showing the public that they should watch their promiscuity and take note of who they date. People can bone anyone they want - but do they really want to bone someone whose hitting up anything/everything that squats their junk and says "c'min git it"? So to that extent - it's a good experiment to make people aware that there's a reason STD's are pretty much everywhere.

That's where my sympathy for this guy ends. He could have still posted on the internet with this experiment in a MUCH more classy way. I would never have revealed faces and would have blurred out identifiable tattoos. To purposely not take those measures is just asking for trouble and it ruins any sense of credibility gained by claiming it was an experiment for the good of public knowledge. What he did was let everyone know WHO was being so promiscuous, not just keeping it an anonymous public notice.

The plaintiff probably won't get very far. He volunteered the information - which went to a public server outside of his intranet. There IS implied risk every time you do something like take a promiscuous picture or make an email with that kind of content and send them off to someone you've never met - much less even know if they exist in the first place. The guy even said "if you're real" or whatever, understanding that it's probably a bot - so he was pretty much scattering the same email around to a bunch of ads and hoping one panned out. That doesn't exactly imply that he was keeping a healthy amount of skepticism about him and withholding any incriminating content. If the guy was really that embarrassed within his family/community, he really should have thought about that before scattering his image/sexual fantasies around the internet like buck shot. Everyone has fantasies and things they'd like to keep private - especially sexual - but that's why they don't do that.