Again, anonymity does not protect you from “frivolous” lawsuits. Yes, SA has done a marvelous job at protecting free speech but that still doesn’t mean you are free from lawsuits if you don’t use your real name.
Many lawsuits are just thrown out because they don’t have any merit. The courts don’t even have a clerk look at some of these; they get filtered by externs (judge > clerk > extern). The court doesn’t have time to deal with all this crap. So perhaps it is worth distinguishing between all lawsuits and lawsuits that have a chance of affecting you.
You sound like the kind of retail investor who invests in frauds and then gets mad when they are exposed. Is that you?
There is virtually no chance a company would be successful in suing a short seller. Those cases get thrown out once they hit the discovery stage if they ever get that far. No fraud stock (which is what short sellers typically target and are correct about most of the time) wants to go to discovery, that’s how people go to jail. This issue you are talking about is exactly why there is a cottage industry of short selling publishers who are willing to take the risk of publishing content other people provide. I can’t think of even one case where an anonymous publishers has lost a lawsuit and this is an area I follow very closely.
My issue with your statement is about annonimity and how that removes liability, which it doesn’t. A company can file a Slapp suit, which has zero chance of winning but has the resources to churn those attorney fees to…bankrupt the entity they are trying to intimidate, silence, etc.
Just because the case gets thrown out you still have to hire a defense team to respond to these complaints, which cost $$$$$$$. So please, don’t assume because you are annonymous that you have zero liability.
It removes a lot of the liability. They have to get through SA, then submit to discovery, then prove their point to a court system that errs on the side of being very friendly to free speech. The cost to defend the initial stages of a lawsuit like that is $20-50K and if you look at the precedents they virtually all get thrown out. This view point is based on extensive legal advice from a white shoe firm in NYC (about $40K in legal bills to prove it). Anyway this is pretty off topic from the original question.
You guys are speaking from the point of view of an American author. Its important to remember the OP is not American, and is subject to a very different set of laws and values compared to the American regulatory and legal system.
This is actually a very interesting topic.
I would be writing the website from german soil, but I am not a german (nor american) citizen.
Let’s say, theoretically, that I register the website outside of Germany and have a friend say, in France, upload contents. Which as far as I can tell is all legal.
Does the German BaFin even have jurisdiction on that just because I am a resident in Germany ???
That’s why I said I thought you were from Quebec. Didn’t know you actually moved away.
^^
FT : that’s correct, I am from Québec originally but I live in Germany.
Now I understand and I must apologise for my initial response to your post ; I had a brainfart and somehow thought that you were Palantir.
I guess that you happened to quote my latest post at the time, which was in turn a response to Palantir’s post.
I thought you were just having a bad day so I let it go. No offense taken.