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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (2746)	4/18/2002 3:14:59 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12465

Chris, thinking out loud here, but I'm curious as to how many messages the Varian jury considered libelous were written after the original lawsuit was filed...years ago. Do you see my point? To me, a layman, it seems logical that what people say or do after an "official" confrontation should be taken in a different context. I mean, if a multi-million dollar corporation decides to sue you, how are you supposed to respond? Are you supposed to bend over for them? When you think about it, if you can't match them dollar for dollar using the legal system, how else can you fight back other than verbally? Most fights don't start with people yelling at the top of their lungs at each other. They start slowly and build up to it. You find yourself being forced to yell louder and louder just to be heard. What I've really tried to do here is purposefully stay away from the specifics of the Varian suit and look at the broader issues. To use an extreme example, I'm sure I'd be appalled at some of the people let off because they weren't given their Miranda rights, but I'd still be forced to defend the legal tenet. Sadly, what makes this whole discussion totally academic is that the jury was never allowed to itemize the libelous posts. Therefore, there is no accurate way to know for sure if perhaps the post lawsuit posts were the ones found to be libelous. Worse, as the jury was not allowed to read various message boards, let alone the one in question, we can't even attach context to our discussion. So why even bother? Lastly, look at Varian's stock price over the last couple of years: finance.yahoo.com. Despite thousands of messages by D+D over the years on their Yahoo thread, the price has gone progressively up! IMO, asking for a judge to toss D+D in jail is a move clearly done out of vanity, not out of some desire to help society or Varian. And that's what upsets me the most. - Jeff