From Slate:
How the Wolf of Wall Street Created the Internet
In a suit to protect his company’s reputation from angry online commenters.
The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s splashy three-hour portrait of financial excess, has produced a surprising amount of Internet controversy: defensive interviews with Leonardo DiCaprio, a scorched-earth “open letter” from the daughter of a convicted trader, and the usual outlandish and bloodthirsty commentary that always peppers online public forums (from desires to “airstrike” a Wall Street movie theater or “cue the guillotines” for bankers, to the typical declarations that theft is “routine” at Goldman Sachs and bankers are “sociopaths”).
HT: The Big PictureWe take the cacophony of the Internet for granted, but two decades ago it wasn’t obvious that it would develop this way. And it turns out we have the real wolf of Wall Street to thank in part for the Internet we’ve got. The rules that allow for our rollicking, easily scandalized Internet would not be the same without Jordan Belfort, the convicted stockbroker who is the model for DiCaprio’s character, and his felonious firm, Stratton Oakmont. In the mid-1990s, Stratton Oakmont started the lawsuit that led to much of the basic legal framework that governs Internet content. Were it not for that lawsuit, and the strange ruling and strong backlash it created, the Internet as we know it might be a very different place.
First, some background. (Yes, that headline was partly a trap: This article will now attempt to explain a complicated area of law.) Traditionally, liability for wrongdoing can extend beyond the parties immediately involved. Employers can be liable for accidents caused by their employees. Bartenders can be liable for serving customers who get behind the wheel. And, in the world of words and ink, publishers can be liable for the materials produced by their authors.
In the early days of the Internet, it was unclear whether and how a variety of new online services—the first chat rooms, message boards, aggregators, and the like—were responsible for the content produced by their third-party users. Possible lawyerly analogies abounded. Were these new Internet service providers more like libraries and booksellers, responsible only as “distributors” and liable only for unlawful content they failed to take down? Or were they more like newspapers and magazines and considered “publishers,” which meant they would be on the hook for defamation, just like the authors?
These questions were pressing because of the sheer number of users generating online content. Even if only a small percentage of them do illegal things—posting nonconsensual nude pictures or spreading intentionally malicious lies—a small percentage of millions of users adds up to a lot of liability. That liability would give ISPs and websites pause before letting their users post and publish freely.Enter Stratton Oakmont. In the mid-1990s, the brokerage house and its then-President Danny Porush (the basis for Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff), sued Prodigy Internet Services over a series of anonymous and allegedly libelous postings on Prodigy’s Money Talk “computer bulletin board.” Among other things, the anonymous comments stated that Porush was a “soon to be proven criminal” and Stratton Oakmont was a “cult of brokers who either lie for a living or get fired.” (Go figure.) ...MORE
