![]() Other former Gawker employees refused to view the settlements with any sort of silver lining. “As for Peter Thiel himself,” he added, “he is now for a wider group of people to contemplate.” Denton wrote, “I am sure they, and others, will continue to shed light on the new power.” As part of the settlement, the individuals involved in the cases - former writer Sam Biddle, and John Cook, current executive editor of the reconstituted Gizmodo Media Group - will no longer be the subjects of litigation. So even if the settlement is frustrating on free-speech grounds, it at least lets the individual journalists who were targeted for doing nothing but writing true stories off the hook. There is essentially no cost for him to wage an endless war on Gawker Media or Nick Denton personally similarly, there is no reason for his lawyers, presented with the opportunity for endless billable hours, to do anything but make each case as extended and excruciating as possible, no matter its merits. Thiel is so wealthy as to place him effectively outside the network of incentives that make the legal system a just forum for negotiating disputes. That motivated a settlement that allows us all to move on, andįocus on activities more productive than endless litigation. The other protagonists - including Hulk Hogan and A.J.ĭaulerio, the author of the Gawker story about him - had much more at For Thiel, an investor in Facebook and Palantir, the cost of thisĮxercise is less than 1% of his net worth and a little additional Daulerio, current executive editor John Cook, and former writer Sam Biddle. As Denton writes, the drain of looming litigation had become unsustainable, in particular because the lawsuits personally targeted journalists - including former Gawker editor A.J. Instead, Ayyadurai - whose claims to have invented email have been thoroughly discredited - will walk away from a billionaire’s proxy legal war substantially richer, and with an accurate but unflattering article about him deleted from the internet.īut this is what happens when a billionaire goes to war against you. The Ayyadurai and Terrill suits were all but certain to have been dismissed when they came to trial early next year. Even people suspicious or dismissive of the Hogan story - concerning as it did a sex tape - should feel nervous about the fact that two indisputably true articles were taken down because their subjects were lucky enough to find a billionaire backer with a grudge. It’s an enormously deflating end to the year’s most dramatic media story. According to court documents, Gawker settled the cases for a total $32.5 million: Hogan will receive $31 million and a percentage of proceeds from the sale Ayyadurai $750,000 and Ashley Terrill, the plaintiff in the Tinder suit, $500,000. All the articles will be removed from the web. But the other two suits - stemming from an article about Shiva Ayyadurai, a man who claims to have invented email but didn’t, and another about the founding of Tinder - were both represented by Hogan’s lawyer Charles Harder, whose bills Thiel has admitted to footing. Of the three lawsuits being settled, only one - wrestler Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy suit, whose enormous judgment forced the company and its founder into bankruptcy - is known to have been funded by Peter Thiel, the Facebook billionaire who revealed this year that he had secretly funded a legal war against Gawker Media. Historian Katie Hafner said it was “appalling” that Ayyadurai “managed to make money off claims that appear to be misleading.Months after declaring bankruptcy, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton announced in a blog post this afternoon that the company - that is, the shell that remains after the other six sites in the network were sold to Univision this summer - had settled three outstanding lawsuits and would not be pressing further appeal. ![]() Speaking to Gizmodo, historians and developers worried that the settlement could weaken the legacy of figures like Tomlinson. Ayyadurai responded with a blog post characterizing him only as “ the inventor of simple text messaging.” Tomlinson also implemented the use of the symbol in email addresses. Most historians consider Ray Tomlinson to have sent the first email proper over ARPANET in 1971. While few seem to dispute that Ayyadurai developed a program called “EMAIL” in 1979 and copyrighted it in 1982, others had sent electronic messages as far back as the 1960s. Get Data Sheet, Fortune ’s technology newsletter.īut the case’s conclusion has been met with frustration by other pioneers, who say that it could muddle the history of one of the most important innovations of the digital revolution.
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