I agree with Marc that Crystal Cox is no journalist. Journalists don't offer their services as reputation managers to the people they are reporting on. Journalists don't engage in bizarre and incomprehensible rants. (Well, OK, not counting cable news.) Journalists don't engage in the writing equivalent of spam. But I'm not convinced that this should matter. I think that Crystal Cox — like me, or Marc Randazza — should enjoy the same protections as a journalist. But with that comes responsibility. If she destroys someone's life — as she did to Padrick — and he can prove that her claims were false and that she had the requisite mental state, then she should pay. If the Ninth Circuit reverses here, despite Crystal Cox's warts, she should get another trial — and then I hope that Padrick thoroughly cockroach-stomps her again. Given the freakish nature of her filings, that seems like a probable result, no matter what standard she is held to.

First, every time Crystal Cox attacks someone, we can band together — as bloggers did for Marc Randazza
when Crystal Cox attacked him — and write fair and factual posts about the target. That substantially blunted Crystal Cox's attempt to destroy Randazza's reputation by spamming numerous nutty blogs about him, pushing her efforts off the first page. As a team, we can render Crystal Cox powerless and largely irrelevant. More speech works. (Now you know why I put up that mysterious Popehat Signal.) It might be nice to start by offering this gesture to Kevin D. Patrick, her victim in the Oregon case. But if you're out there — if she's gone after you, or threatened to — we can help you, too. We'll throw up the Popehat Signal and gather a more-speech team and flush her off the first pages of your search results.

Labels: public service announcement, technology

# posted by Squach : 4:59 PM   |