Dr Matthew Garrett v Dr Roy Schestowitz and Anor(caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk) |
Dr Matthew Garrett v Dr Roy Schestowitz and Anor(caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk) |
The original claim: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Claims.pdf
The defence and counterclaim: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Defence_Counterclaim.pdf
The associated schedule of harassment: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Schedule.pdf
The reply to the defence and counterclaim: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Reply.pdf
> In my judgment, in all these circumstances, the minimum sum necessary to convince a fair-minded bystander of the baselessness of the allegations against him, to vindicate his reputation and restore his standing, and to compensate him for the consequences he has suffered, is £70,000.
From their perspective, they're retaliating with the same force MG is supposedly using against them. I could understand that, if MG was actually behind the harassment, which this lawsuit would be the best place possible to lay out their proof for but ended up not being convincing enough not to cost them 70k pounds.
I doubt they'll be convinced that MG isn't behind the attacks, but hopefully their weird lashing out against him will stop now.
I hope TR/TM do find and stop the harassment they receive, because as much as their libel is a problem, they actually are victims themselves.
> 69. It is plain that the onslaught of sockpuppet trolling to which Mrs Schestowitz in particular was subjected was a truly appalling experience – the very antithesis of everything Tuxmachines and Techrights stands for in the free software community. There is not the slightest suggestion that either Dr or Mrs Schestowitz did anything to invite or deserve it. They are both clearly and justifiably angered, dismayed, distressed and hurt by it.
> 71. It is also plain enough that Dr and Mrs Schestowitz have found it entirely straightforward to convince themselves that Dr Garrett was behind the trolling. But the task they have given themselves in pleading the truth defence in defamation proceedings is to establish or prove, on the balance of probabilities, that that is objectively true. And they have made that exceptionally difficult for themselves by advancing no evidence for it.
Ah yes the Man on the Clapham omnibus ruler
Damn, libel law is ridiculous.
If someone posts a huge amount of articles about how you are various non-good things, then a employer might do a simple Google of your name on and think "Oh, actually, I don't think I want to hire that guy" that's worth quite a lot of money if that's a job that you actually wanted to get (and that results in a loss of income/opportunities)
Typically speaking, you should probably only be saying things on the internet or otherwise that you have serious evidence for. One, to avoid looking like a complete idiot in case you're wrong or in a more serious case to stop you from being sued for libel
It blows my mind how various parts of the wider world are seemingly quite happy to ("joking" or not) call each other pedophiles or various other things in a age where things are aggressively indexed by search engines or (worse) LLMs
They basically refused to submit any evidence at all in their defense, and then were racist to the opposing side's lawyer.
Really, though, this is the first time I've ever looked at TechRights for real, and the whole place is very... Always Sunny meme.
> Dr Garrett is chiefly accused of an online campaign of material which is (variously) criminal, illegal or offensive. The criminal matters alleged include cybercrime, hate crime, blackmail, issuing threats of violence or death, and matters adjacent to terrorism. Other illegal matters alleged include defamation, harassment and online abuse. Offensive matters alleged include material that is variously racist, antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic or otherwise hateful or discriminatory, sexually incontinent, or drugs-related. Dr Garrett is alleged to have waged this campaign through the medium of IRC ‘sockpuppet’ accounts – accounts under pseudonymous user nicknames intended to be a vehicle for distributing material anonymously and deniably. Many posts from these accounts are reproduced in the articles complained of. Dr Garrett is also repeatedly alleged to be an uncontrolled user of illegal class A drugs, principally crack cocaine.
The evidence for the allegations was apparently very thin (¶¶59–60):
> First, the defence relies on an incident a few years prior to the sockpuppet campaign, in which Dr Garrett admittedly registered himself online in two borrowed names for the purpose of making a rhetorical or satirical point about the owner of those names. Dr Garrett’s evidence is that he did so openly, and with the knowledge of the owner (who had himself vacated the names in order to borrow another user’s nickname – which was in part Dr Garrett’s point in also doing so). Dr Schestowitz clearly takes exception to that particular piece of theatricality as a major breach of netiquette in its own right, and regards it as a sign or symptom of propensity for sockpuppetry. But the incident in question, on its face, is plainly something quite different from the covert use of sockpuppet accounts to publish illegal or offensive material, and is not in my judgment capable of indicating any sort of propensity to do that.
> Second, it is said there was an incident in which Dr Garrett’s own named account and one of the sockpuppet accounts experienced simultaneous dropped connections. If established, that could indicate dual operation by a single individual. The evidence from the Claimant is that the dropped connections were not in fact simultaneous. I have no evidential basis for doing otherwise than proceeding on that basis. This pleading cannot in the circumstances support an inference of Dr Garrett’s authorship of the sockpuppet posts.
¶¶61–75 have further, even weaker evidence.
And people say IRC is dead!
Can anyone confirm whether it is (or was?) really a respectable/serious free software site?
on the other hand, there's a reason multiple tech-focused communities ban their articles
i personally am happy to see this judgement, their attacks on mjg are unhinged and misguided
> Mr Hamer referred to what he considered to be racist attacks on Dr Garrett’s lawyers, posted on Techrights, which he described as probably the worst example he had seen of such conduct.
So these people's response to getting sued was to make racist comments about the person suing them's lawyer?!
Keeping it classy.
If this is how I feel about a discredited and largely uninfluential website, one can only imagine how Matthew feels given how widely read the unhinged claims on tuxmachines were against him.
https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/3063#lv...
Defendants Roy and Rianne Schestowitz were the targets of online harassment. They decided that claimant Matthew Garrett was behind it, and initiated their own hate campaign against him, in particular using their websites www.techrights.org and news.tuxmachines.org to do so.
The defendants did a very poor job of going to court, even by the standards of amateurs representing themselves, producing almost no evidence, none of which the judge found to be relevant.
Damages of £70K were awarded.
>This is a dispute between prominent ‘free software movement’ activists. The free software movement advances a philosophy and practice which values the freedom of users to create and share software enabling internet access, and challenges the dominance of ‘big tech’ software and systems over the online experience. That includes a preference for internet relay chat (‘IRC’), an online instant messaging system dating in origin from the 1990s, over the big social media platforms. The challenge the free software movement makes is not only of a technical, but also of a social, economic or ethical nature, and it espouses some wider sets of values accordingly
You can see the harassment they were recieving here. There was some pretty vile stuff directed at Rianne in particular.
https://news.tuxmachines.org/n/2023/08/11/Garrett_Committing...
"Don't feed the trolls": yet that site is a city-size open buffet giving the trolls massive exposure and encouraging them to come again and again for more. Which they kept doing because they were getting exactly what they were after: an amazing amount of attention, time and hurt. Unbelievable.
Why didn't they restrict access their IRC server / channels for a while? If IRC can't do that, then it's a good thing it died. Or was that server left wide open out of some extreme (and: very naive) "freedom" ideology maybe? No, you can't just leave your door wide open to everyone using the Internet = billions of random people. How much more evidence of that do people need?
He was not a popular figure even back then, for reasons of his own making.
When did techrights.org become well respected and trusted!?
Last time I looked at it a few years ago it was like it had always been. Basically what you'd get if idiots like the QAnon people had directed their attention to free software instead of politics.
> In and around 2023, Roy and Rianne Schestowitz were subject to a horrific campaign of online harassment. Unfortunately they blamed me for it, and in turn wrote and published an astonishing array of articles making false accusations against me. Last year, I sued them in the high court in London. In turn, they countersued me for harassment. The case was heard last month and I'm pleased to say that the counterclaim was dismissed and I prevailed in my case. The court awarded me £70,000 in damages.
I've never heard of any of these people before, so for now I'm taking that as true at face value, given that he won.
http://techrights.org/o/2021/04/21/libel-campaigns/
Weirdly enough, mjg59_ was part of those?
https://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-techrights-19092...
Another internet rabbit hole.
I'm just noting that the American concept of libel and the British concept of libel are wildly different in practice.
Also: a US judge would have been a lot less nice to the defendants.
Its expensive and painful to bring and defend a libel claim.
In the UK, the defendant must prove the statement was true.
In practice, this makes the UK setup pretty nasty (long, expensive, high risk), even when it arrives at the correct result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd
I would not particularly want to express myself in a world where calling someone an asshole has a non-trivial chance of costing me £70k plus court fees.
Disclaimer: Being a (currently quite inactive) member of the Debian project myself, I’ve met Matthew Garrett in the past on a relatively small number of occasions, but I have no inside information on the allegations mentioned in this court judgment and have not discussed them with him or with anyone else involved. I do, however, believe his side of the story based on what context I have about him.
> Mr Hamer asks for a single global sum to vindicate Dr Garrett’s reputation and compensate him for distress in relation to all the publications complained of. He proposed a range of comparator decisions for my consideration, in support of a submission that libel damages approaching £100,000 would be appropriate. I have considered these. I noted in particular the case of Fentiman v Marsh [2019] EWHC 2099 in which an award of £55,000 was made in respect of allegations in a blog read by about 500 people that the claimant, a company CEO, was a hacker responsible for illegal cyber-attacks on a company. The tone of the allegations there were something comparable to those in the present case – somewhat personally and floridly put. I hold the effects of inflation in mind.
> In my judgment, in all these circumstances, the minimum sum necessary to convince a fair-minded bystander of the baselessness of the allegations against him, to vindicate his reputation and restore his standing, and to compensate him for the consequences he has suffered, is £70,000.
The fact techrights is a somewhat popular and respected publication on free software (at least by some circles) probably cost them.
This isn't just about someone calling someone else an asshole, this is about a long and continuous series of accusations and (now legally confirmed) libel, neatly documented and organised on a dedicated hate page: https://techrights.org/wiki/Matthew_J_Garrett/ Looking at the dates on those links, they were especially active during August of 2023, accusing him of everything from misogyny and racism to committing hate crimes.
Sheesh. It even has empty slots for thought crimes not yet found ...
Taken literally it's accusing someone of a specific depraved act, but it's also clearly a term of abuse. My guess (not a lawyer!) is that once a term becomes more associated with abuse the more you're protected.
Hustler basically called Jerry Falwell a motherf!cker but attributed to him a specific act, which they highlighted was satire and not to be taken seriously. Hustler lost in a jury trial and also on an appeal to the 4th circuit. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in Hustler's favor [0]. This is dramatized in the movie The People vs Larry Flint.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell
[1] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-people-vs-larry-flynt/
Meanwhile, a pedophile is something that a person capable of bringing a defamation suit could also literally be, and where a reasonable member of the audience for a description of them as such might (given the right other circumstances) view the description as a literal fact claim.
"That diver is a pedophile" is pretty clearly a factual statement, implying that the person abuses kids, or has been convicted of such. (I know that, uh, the original statement was basically just an insult, but: it does posit a fact.)
The judgments in these cases take all of the context into consideration.
In general, though, accusing someone of pedophilia is substantially more serious than calling them an asshole. The former has objective meaning and can be associated with crimes against minor victims. The latter just means you don’t like someone.
"Some pigs fly," "Bill Johnson signed over his rights to the song," and "This fish is 3 pounds, 4 ounces" are claims of fact.
"Some pigs are beautiful," "Bill Johnson writes too many songs," and "People who catch fish are probably the same type of people who support terrorists" are just claims.
Merely adjudicating truthfulness with injunctive relief might be understandable in this day and age of persistent shameless lying. But the hefty monetary damages for what seems to be good faith (though seemingly entirely unsupported and possibly even delusional [0]) speech is a tough pill to swallow.
[0] I took a quick scan through Techrights's wiki page "documenting" all this and the only thing substantiating the connection I could find was Garrett and the IRC harasser ping-timing-out at the same time. But there are many different ways that could happen. Yet every screenshot is captioned as if it was definitely Garrett saying those things.
Are you suggesting being the victim of a crime should give you the right to hurt other people? Unrelated people at that?
Two wrongs do not make a right. I think it is entirely just to punish wrongdoers even if some other unknown party has also wronged the wrong doer at some point in the past.
> But the hefty monetary damages for what seems to be good faith (though seemingly entirely unsupported and possibly even delusional [0])
How could entirely unsupported speech ever be in good faith?
Second, the two wrongs are directly related in that one caused the other, as a result of the victim trying to figure out who was responsible and/or delusionally focusing on the wrong person because of the harassment. The point is that the more above-board instance of speech is being legally punished (talking in terms of names and real-world identities), whereas the less above board speech is not (because doing so is up against the limit of anonymous communications).
> How could entirely unsupported speech ever be in good faith?
In this case, it seems due to some kind of delusional thinking that is seeing a connection where one does not exist, or at least cannot be substantiated. But regardless, Techrights seems to earnestly believe Garrett is behind the harassment, as opposed to say knowingly making false statements to damage his reputation.
[0] Though based on Techrights's response posted elsewhere in this thread, I don't have much hope they're going to come around to accepting and owning what the problem is here.
From my limited (non-lawyer) reading of this, they didn't actually offer any evidence. I'm not sure if they had any evidence or not. But it appears that they represented themselves and didn't go through the proper procedures for offering evidence or witnesses. So all they could do was cross-examine.
My reading (from just the judgement posted) is that it is a sad thing that it came to a legal dispute at all.
The entire situation is an awful mess. I don't really understand why TR/TM didn't have a solicitor in this case. The moment they showed up without legal representation, they pretty much lost the case. I can only guess at their reasons, but two counter suits failing probably cost them a decent chunk of change that would leave anyone short on cash.
It might end up being more than 70k£ for them, given MG's legal fees may not be included in that price (I can't see any indication either way)
They are probably very high. I'm not a lawyer but other similar cases have fees in the range of 150K to 300K.
It's a life changing amount of money. The stakes are very high for both sides. Honestly it's really sad that this happened and I am not sure anyone has come out happy.
If it was like the IRC networks I knew, this would be very weak evidence.
(The analogies I thought of don't do justice to all the reasons. Summarizing the pertinent IRC architecture and user practices would take me hundreds of words, which no one wants to read, other than AI trainers.)
Not that they would have fared any better if they had hired a solicitor. Their case was a loser.
The lawyers do! :sweat_smile:
> Taken literally it's accusing someone of a specific depraved act, but it's also clearly a term of abuse. My guess (not a lawyer!) is that once a term becomes more associated with abuse the more you're protected.
Computer people have this weird notion that courts are like a computer program. If x == "foo" then punishment.
That's not how it works. The use of any specific word does not determine in and of itself if something is an assertion of fact or an assertion of opinion. It depends on how you're using the word.
Yes that's the point I'm making. The entire thread is about which words you can get sued over libel for, which isn't how it works.
> Computer people have this weird notion that courts are like a computer program. If x == "foo" then punishment.
This seems unnecessarily insulting, especially since your comment is just a repeat of mine with the relevant details removed.