Blogosphere sues itself
 | Posted by The Editor on Friday 13 October 2006, 8:08 am Categories: The internet Tags: Tags: Australia, bloggers, Blogosphere, GodwinsLaw, GrodsLaw, libel, sue |
Australian bloggers shouted out in glee this morning when they took the three steps from their bed to their computer and read the news that a blogger in the USA has successfully sued another blogger for libel, winning US$5 million dollars in damages.
Within minutes, Australian bandwidth consumption skyrocketed as thousands of bloggers furiously travelled the internet archiving copies of their mortal blogging enemies’ web pages containing accusations against them of being “idiots”, “retards”, “lefties” and “Nazis”. At the same time, each of these bloggers was furiously trawling their own blogs deleting any insult they may have thrown towards their mortal blogging enemies, all the while nervously preparing defences for imagined court proceedings. By 9am this morning the Australian blogosphere resembled a desert with almost all content deleted and replaced by 404 errors, while emails were flying back and forth between Hotmail addresses to faceless pseudonyms threatening in illiterate blogging prose to “bring teh full forse of the law upon you becos of the outrite lies and unthuths youve been propegating about my charecter on teh internet.”
Make no mistake, threats to sue for libel will now become standard ammunition in any blog comments war, alongside Godwin’s Law which holds that most comment wars will end in a comparison of at least one party to Nazis. This new phenomenon will be known as GrodsLaw: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a threat to sue for libel approaches one.
GrodsThink Ep.29 (26/8/08)
