Good Journalism, Bad Law?

Wow. If you ever want to see the difference between law and journalism, look at these two stories here and here. Or...between good journalism and bad law, let's say.

We've all been following the story of how Stroker Serpentine has been chasing an avatar called Volkov Cattaneo, as furiously as Anthony Zuiker is telling us to chase evil murderous furries in his CSINY game in SL.

Volkov was seemingly going to be able to give him the slip because he bragged to Reuters reporter evidently in an inworld avataric interview that he gave false info to LL when signing up, and couldn't be tracked. Many people who have been griefed by anonymous anonomyzer-using alts gnashed their teeth -- that is indeed the issue.

Not for Stroker, who did the very thing that Cristiano Midnight always used to sneer at me about, and say rarely happened -- by getting the Lindens to turn over the IP address associated with the "Volkov" account, he was able to convince AT&T and another ISP to turn over the home address of the people associated with this IP address. So yes, when they want to, they can crawl down the Internets and track you from your ISP to your very home.

That is -- a private detective hired by Stroker can -- and he came and found a quintessential SL user, apparently, a 19-year-old 325-pound kid with a goatee beard living with his grandma in what is described as "modest housing". Of course, granny could have been hustling the Sexgens, but suspicion fell on the kid as the likely IT master of his household, and the 2nd ISP of another Dallas home had people in it who said he had logged on at their house, so the fingers of suspicion all pointed at him. Nevertheless, Eric Reuters was careful merely to quote the claims of the private investigator in the story, about confronting the kid and careful to report in balanced fashion high up in the story that the kid also denied these allegations. He never claims he is the perpetrator or takes a side in the story.

No so sense of balance from Benjamin Duranske of Morally Blind, who I've dubbed "Benjamin Sycophanske" (I could call him Suckophanske but this is a family blog) for the craven way in which he has sucked up to those with power and prestige in SL. His headline says confidently "Defendant Named in Eros Copyright Suit" (contrast with Reuters' "Eros lawyers ID ‘John Doe’ avatar; Youth denies he’s Catteneo". Duranske writes, with moral and journalistic blindness, "Alderman has confirmed the identity" -- but never questions that he could be mistaken. In a household with 4 people in it, in a situation where kids are wandering around plugging in laptops, could we please get a little more, uh, evidence here?

I continue to worry about how this case could well establish bad precedent just like Bragg did by never reaching the court phase and never getting a legal decision. It establishes then only one thing: that the legal system can be used with iffy cases to hunt down people you hate in Second Life, who do things you don't like.

The constraints on doing this in real life are considerable. What we're finding with Second Life is that they are not.

Oh, to be sure, Sychophanske slips in an "allegedly" on his sentence down in paragraph 3. But the implication is already made, by the headline, "Defendant Named in Eros Copyright Suit" and the first graph: "Eros LLC has filed an amended complaint (.pdf) naming Robert Leatherwood, of North Richland Hills, Texas, as the John Doe defendant previously known only by his Second Life avatar’s name, ‘Volkov Catteneo.’ "

But he rushes to get Stroker's statement, high up in the story:

"Alderman confirmed the identity by email, and added that Leatherwood is nineteen, and lives with his grandmother, great grandmother, and uncle. Alderman said, “I am saddened that Leatherwood doesn’t understand the severity of his actions and the evidence we have against him."

More creepily, Benjie himself started trying to call the home of the kid named in the article, allegedly the typist of Volkov -- ugh. It's a lot like Peter Ludlow trying to bug Evangeline's mom from the Sims Online and putting up a local reporter to keep calling her and trying to get the dirt on Evangeline.

There's something just very troublesome all the way around that people are so vindictively willing to follow up their Second Life vendettas that they are able to turn the wheels of justice and get somebody sicced at their modest home by their ISP.

The 50 beds that this Volkov was said to have copied and sold would have totalled $2,250 US. Stroker probably spends than in 2 days alone of his lawyer's time, if not more -- it seems insane.

If the offer from the litigators is that they would like to give Volkov a chance to settle if he cooperates, why break down the door as if they were in a cheap cop show like CSINY, trailing in the sensational press and gawking public to stare at this typical SL member -- who in fact was quoted as saying he didn't log on to SL for a year?

What's clear about this story is that Eric, who hasn't even graduated from Columbia Journalism School yet, is trying very hard to be a good reporter and try to reflect both sides in this very emotionally -- and I might add financially -- charged story. Eric seems to be simply a good reporter, having no objective or subjective need to butter up FIC extraordinaire Stroker, about whom he is level-headed, or to butter up the kid, like some extremist hacker blogger.

Benjie, on the other hand, has shown us time and again his avid participation in the Social Climbing Index, bonding with the oppressives at Terra Nova over the evil Prokofy one day, sucking up to Aimee Weber another day writing touchingly, like an infatuated school boy, about her "stompy boots" and her right to trademark her avatar (a concept that needs putting to the test, given that we all have the same sliders and can buy the same prim hair and dresses in SL and look alike due to good marketing, not due to theft).

Clearly, Sycophanske wants Stroker to win. As an IT guy in his pre-law life, he belongs to that class of people who want code to be law -- especially *their own* code lol.

Stroker/Kevin Alderman is quoted by "Virtually Blind" as follows:

"Witness statements, Linden Lab account information, and numerous corroborating sources assure us we have our guy. If he continues to deny his guilt we will seek the full damages afforded to us by law, which are considerable."

Doesn't anybody find this really pretty worrisome stuff? Will Shava "Social Consiousness" Shintuz step up to the plate on this one (Syco linked to her blog over the CSI story as if to show he was broad-minded about criticism of CSINY, but all she criticizes is the failure of the viewer to download).

When it came to his fellow lawyer, about whom he apparently only wanted to show solidarity and brotherhood, Sycophanske raised serious questions about the privacy implications of Linden Lab gathering and keeping chat logs on people (these came out at discovery in the Bragg case).

But when it comes to calling at home some kid Stroker thinks copied his bed, that's ok.

Oh, Stroker may well have the goods on this kid -- but we can't know that until the evidence is heard, and we're not even the jurors in this case. Stroker is bound and determined to make a show trial out of this case, to try to establish that like Napster, people who suffer theft of their copyrighted digital items will fight back hard. That's all well and good. But what about the protection of the rule of law and all the values of privacy and right to a fair trial? The world is already judging a fat kid who is 6'4", 325 pounds, living with his grannies, and suffering from ADD -- if it were up to the Second Life merchants' community, he would have already been executed at dawn.

This thread on VB brings other "delights" as well, like the appearance of csven, as if he is acceptable in polite company. He's not. But then, he may well have found his proper home there at Morally Blind.

This article in a Tampa paper gives you more good journalism on this case -- the kind of real-life journalism that real-life editors demand from real papers that so contrast with virtual lawyers about a virtual world.

It's truly bizarre that a private detective and Alderman are crashing around solving this case as if in their own private detective game, but more traditional authorities like "the police" aren't the ones going to the door and telling the young man that he can have what we like to call "his Miranda rights". ("You have the right to remain silent...anything you say may be used against you in a court of law".)

"We have our man," Alderman announces gloatingly to Duranske -- as if he is Dudley Doright -- and you sense Syco gloating right along with him.

Meanwhile, the paper says:

"But Leatherwood, who described himself as a high-school dropout with no job, said he's not the guy they're looking for. "They've got no evidence whatsoever," Leatherwood said during a telephone interview this morning. Although he acknowledged having access to the Volkov Catteneo account and using it, he said it's "not officially mine." He also said he did not use or copy Alderman's device, the Sex Gen. "I'm not into that kind of stuff," he said.

That is, both versions of this contentious story are told, and GASP the reader is allowed to weigh the evidence himself, instead of being knocked over the head with a FIC club.

These little distinctions like telling all sides of the story common to old meat-world dying dinosaur media journalism aren't appreciated by bloggers, and bloggers are supposed to be making up for the "bias" of the RL media in the first place. Sure, bloggers should be columnists and take a point of view -- I know I do. But I don't elect myself as a prosecutor to go knock down people's doors and make criminal accusations against them.

Taney, Stroker's lawyer (and BTW, FlipperPAY's attorney and the attorney for the SLCC, which also involved that awful musicians' rights mess in the contracts), is very confident:

"Alderman's attorney, Frank Taney in Philadelphia, said that his investigation found Volkov Catteneo logged into Second Life from computers in two houses. One of them was in the home where Leatherwood lives and the other in a house where residents say Leatherwood used a computer and entered Second Life.

"How many people on this planet could it be?" Taney said."

Well, it could be anyone in the household, even the grannies. It could be random friends who come in and out and use this account -- playing with each others' accounts at each others' houses is very, very widespread among kids; piggybacking off people's wireless accounts is also very common.

Meanwhile, the man charged with being "Volkov" says in his own defense that this is exactly the problem -- apparently an ex-friend with a vendetta:

"I do believe they may have been misdirected on this," Leatherwood said. He said "an ex-friend of mine in Dallas" called up Alderman and Taney "as soon as he got whiff of what they were looking for. He called them up and claimed I was this avatar they were looking for. We're on pretty bad terms a lot of fighting."

Sound like that snitch culture cultivated by the Lindens with the odious AR system that enables anyone to anonymously report on their fellow avatar without any consequence in order to settle scores? And get him nailed to the wall for 3 days or forever?

Stroker has made his case -- all well and good. Sycophanske has helped him make his case, even willing to call up the suspect (we *do* get to still use that term, right) *himself* and enact a real-life Anthony Zuiker fantasy!

But now we need the other side. We need some really good cyber-lawyers and civil-defense attorneys to get iinvolved for the sake of upholding the rights of us all.

Comments

[piworkshop]

Looks like good entertainment. Quite a storyline. Love the investigative angle of it.