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The Lawbringer: Mailbag 4.0
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Welcome to another exciting mailbag edition of The Lawbringer. I've pulled some of my favorite questions from my inbox this week to discuss topics like slander, libel, and that pesky idea about gold selling that I had during one the recent WoW Insider Show (I think it was the WoW Insider Show; I do a lot of shows sometimes) about the auction house. Somewhere, Basil has felt a twinge in his leg, as if a thousand voices cried out in unison and then were quickly silenced by the ringing of the auction house bells ... If you've got a question for The Lawbringer, send it along to mat@wowinsider.com. Be sure to include some sort of subject that lets me know that you're asking a Lawbringer question, because otherwise it will probably get lost in the millions of potential tags your email could be filed under. A long time ago, I was reading a post by venerable internet man Merlin Mann about managing your inbox and fighting with the notion that email needed to be sorted and dealt with quickly. It's been years since then, and I hate my inbox more and more every day because I never listened to Merlin.
Google ordered to pay libel damages to perturbed gentleman, plans to appeal
You know those search terms that automatically pop up once you begin typing something on Google? Yeah, that's Google Suggest, and it's just an aggregate of the most popular searches based on past requests from users. In other words, Google doesn't actually generate those suggestions itself, nor does some magical alien in its California labs. Despite all that, the Superior Court of Paris has ordered El Goog to shell out €5,000 ($6,721) to an unnamed gentleman who claimed that searches for his name automatically led to a list of suggestions that were damaging to his reputation. The kicker? Said gentleman actually had been "condemned to a prison sentence on charges of corrupting a minor" earlier in his life. Imagine that -- humans interested in his story were searching for his name along with "rape," "rapist" and "prison." Shame on you, Google. P.S. - Google's appealing, for obvious reasons.
