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I'm curious if any HNers have any ideas for ways to use off-shore status to protect your website from frivolous libel claims. I run some forums in the automoti

I'm curious if any HNers have any ideas for ways to use off-shore status to protect your website from frivolous libel claims. I run some forums in the automotive industry that have been around for about 15 years. I take pride on being pro-free speech and loosely moderating things, only taking down obviously illegal posts, copyright infringements, etc. Despite that, I still occasionally get legal threats from people who have gotten their feelings hurt. In one case, the threats came from an actual attorney who was representing a shady commercial seller who got into it with some of our members. I would love to move the ownership of the forums to some sort of arrangement (offshore) where they are essentially immune to frivolous libel claims. I want attorneys to look at us and tell their clients that it's simply not worth going after us. Is there such a place? edit: I forgot to mention that my site runs no ads and makes no money whatsoever...a rarity in the forums world. I keep it like this because I love the hobby and I hate all of the other shitty forums sites that are filled with adware garbage. Given this, it's a real hardship when some attorney threatens me with a lawsuit because I just don't have the cash to properly defend myself.

myrryr 9y ago
New Zealand? The courts here are pretty sensible. They have 0 issues with telling someone they are just being silly and to leave. They can still bring a case against you - but, it isn't expensive to defend like the US is.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Didn't protect Kim Dotcom.
  - function_seven 9y ago
    OP isn’t looking for shield from the US Government. Your “didn’t protect” comments aren’t really relevant.
  - MikeEhrmantraut 9y ago
    In my case, I'm not involved in any copyright infringement. I'm merely trying to protect myself from frivolous libel threats. The problem with these threats is that you're forced into making a choice: spend real money to defend yourself (my site makes no income) or give in to the assholes and take down posts. When the disputed post concerns a shady for-sale transaction, removing the post effectively whitewashes the shady seller's reputation and potentially exposes innocent future buyers to getting hosed. It's a crappy situation and I just want to be immune to it all.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      So just run the site anonymously. If you're really paranoid, on a Tor onion. If you only somewhat paranoid, on a server from Host Sailor or another tolerant host. Edit: If you're really really paranoid, on a Tor onion, hosted on an anonymously leased server, from a tolerant host. And know your OPSEC.
      - function_seven 9y ago
        Didn’t protect Ross Ulbricht :)
        mirimir 9y ago
        True. But he made stupid mistakes. Such as leaking his true-name email address in posts about SR on Bitcoin Forum and StackExchange. And misconfiguring Apache so it leaked error messages from its clearnet IP. And having an iptables rule in the server that pointed to a private VPN server that he'd created. And buying a bunch of fake driver's licenses, and having them sent to him in SF.
- ivanjaros 9y ago
  Are you serious? After what they did to Dotcom? Heck no.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    The New Zealand court system has not been unfair to Kim Dotcom. The actions of NZ police in his arrest are inexcusable, and so is the use of government spy agencies to spy on a resident. But the courts are independent of all that. Kim Dotcom actually just won a $90k settlement from the Human Rights Tribunal.
throwaway9980 9y ago
Panama might be a good place to start looking for a lawyer. I have friends in other Central American countries who can’t stop singing the praises of Panamanian incorporation. They seem very confident that they can get away with all sorts of cringe inducing shenanigans. Your use case is mild by comparison but of course ymmv.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Didn't protect Liberty Reserve.
  - mattsfrey 9y ago
    The US government coming after you for facilitating massive fraud and countless other illegal activities is hardly the same as some idiot suing you.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Just a different sort of idiot, as I see it.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - blackbagboys 9y ago
        The only thing that guarantees you protection from the ire of the U.S. federal government is possession of at least one thermonuclear weapon. The goal for these corporate vehicles is to shield oneself from civil lawsuits, not the wrath of the Justice Department.
        mirimir 9y ago
        Keeping them from knowing who you are also helps a lot.
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
woodpanel 9y ago
I can wholeheartedly echo your concern. Operating from Europe I am looking for the same. For me, it is not just about protecting free speech by not having to fear litigation costs, but also privacy: Extremists from left to right make heavy use of what private data they can find about owners of websites and try to destroy them publicly or use threats/actions of violence against them. (Other example: I repeatedly run across pyramid schemes. Setting up a simple, yet convincing set of facts as a website, that would keep people from being fooled into these is my initial response. But I always restrain from doing so when I look at two things: - how litigious these schemes often are (it often takes years for authorities to catch up to them) - how emotionally attached (and often shady) the scheme's propenents are)
tim333 9y ago
Not sure if its completely ideal but uk companies are cheap to set up and its hard work and costly to sue for libel.
buro9 9y ago
I run just under 300 forums on much the same basis and have been sued in the past in the UK. Feel free to co-opt my very expensive lawyer T&Cs which were designed specifically for this scenario (if you haven't actually had a lawyer draw up yours they may be a better default for you): https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal Ultimately in Europe I now feel fine: + EU e-commerce directive has "mere conduit" + Reactive moderation sets you aside from a publishing company and fits into "mere conduit" + Key thing for you is to not engage in any incidents as a participant, deny you even know that they are occurring... but if someone contacts you and tells you something is shady, etc you should shut that down ASAP - bear in mind that to some extent this does mean the admin of a forum shouldn't be an active user of the forum. So for just shutting stuff down within a reasonable time, you basically get to be very immune from any libel, defamation, slander, etc that occurs as a result of your users. Together with the change in UK law that shifted burden onto those raising a claim (they must prove actual damages - a surprisingly hard thing to do), I have not now had any legal threats in about 4 years despite still running as many forums that are barely (if at all) moderated.
- alex_hitchins 9y ago
  Side questions, but what sort of hardware & connectivity do you have for supporting that number of forums? I'd have thought at that level you would be in to duplicate hardware etc.
  - buro9 9y ago
    Just a few linodes run them all and we tend to have low thousands of concurrent users at any time but can comfortably handle high hundreds of thousands of guests. A friend and I wrote a forum platform for them :) As a startup that didn't get anywhere, but the main premise was that forum hosting is expensive (almost 1 server per forum, not very optimised for caching, every page is dynamic, etc) due to them not being on a true platform (shared costs, optimisations, and less waste in CPU and bandwidth), and we also hypothesised that forums have a natural life and when they die they cross-pollinate new forums (total growth in user engagement across communities continues even when a single community dies)... hence it's best to make a platform, and that the reduced costs for all actually makes them financially viable (though when we shut the startup I chose non-advertising and to do donations instead). This is the forum platform: https://microco.sm https://microco.sm but it's not really open for new forums, as I manually have to enable them and I'm concerned about future offboarding requests (not something I support at all). This is an example of a forum on the platform: https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com which is the largest, but there are just shy of 300 on a wide range of topics.
philg_jr 9y ago
Any chance you can drop the name here? I'm a motorhead and my beloved community-supported mazdaspeed community has basically dried up and migrated to facebook...
codingdave 9y ago
If the suits are truly frivolous, you are fine. Threats and letters are utterly meaningless in and of themselves. No attorney will actually take a frivolous suit to court, although they will try to bully and scare your with formal letterhead and words. And if there is a real suit, being offshore won't protect you from the suit. You may be able to get it tossed out for lack of jurisdiction, and ultimately be immune from consequences, but that still means you need to either argue that point yourself it court or hire legal help to get it tossed.

myrryr 9y ago

New Zealand? The courts here are pretty sensible. They have 0 issues with telling someone they are just being silly and to leave. They can still bring a case against you - but, it isn't expensive to defend like the US is.

mirimir 9y ago
Didn't protect Kim Dotcom.
- function_seven 9y ago
  OP isn’t looking for shield from the US Government. Your “didn’t protect” comments aren’t really relevant.
- MikeEhrmantraut 9y ago
  In my case, I'm not involved in any copyright infringement. I'm merely trying to protect myself from frivolous libel threats. The problem with these threats is that you're forced into making a choice: spend real money to defend yourself (my site makes no income) or give in to the assholes and take down posts. When the disputed post concerns a shady for-sale transaction, removing the post effectively whitewashes the shady seller's reputation and potentially exposes innocent future buyers to getting hosed. It's a crappy situation and I just want to be immune to it all.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    So just run the site anonymously. If you're really paranoid, on a Tor onion. If you only somewhat paranoid, on a server from Host Sailor or another tolerant host. Edit: If you're really really paranoid, on a Tor onion, hosted on an anonymously leased server, from a tolerant host. And know your OPSEC.
    - function_seven 9y ago
      Didn’t protect Ross Ulbricht :)
      - mirimir 9y ago
        True. But he made stupid mistakes. Such as leaking his true-name email address in posts about SR on Bitcoin Forum and StackExchange. And misconfiguring Apache so it leaked error messages from its clearnet IP. And having an iptables rule in the server that pointed to a private VPN server that he'd created. And buying a bunch of fake driver's licenses, and having them sent to him in SF.
ivanjaros 9y ago
Are you serious? After what they did to Dotcom? Heck no.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  The New Zealand court system has not been unfair to Kim Dotcom. The actions of NZ police in his arrest are inexcusable, and so is the use of government spy agencies to spy on a resident. But the courts are independent of all that. Kim Dotcom actually just won a $90k settlement from the Human Rights Tribunal.

throwaway9980 9y ago

Panama might be a good place to start looking for a lawyer. I have friends in other Central American countries who can’t stop singing the praises of Panamanian incorporation. They seem very confident that they can get away with all sorts of cringe inducing shenanigans. Your use case is mild by comparison but of course ymmv.

mirimir 9y ago
Didn't protect Liberty Reserve.
- mattsfrey 9y ago
  The US government coming after you for facilitating massive fraud and countless other illegal activities is hardly the same as some idiot suing you.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Just a different sort of idiot, as I see it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - blackbagboys 9y ago
      The only thing that guarantees you protection from the ire of the U.S. federal government is possession of at least one thermonuclear weapon. The goal for these corporate vehicles is to shield oneself from civil lawsuits, not the wrath of the Justice Department.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Keeping them from knowing who you are also helps a lot.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

woodpanel 9y ago

I can wholeheartedly echo your concern. Operating from Europe I am looking for the same. For me, it is not just about protecting free speech by not having to fear litigation costs, but also privacy: Extremists from left to right make heavy use of what private data they can find about owners of websites and try to destroy them publicly or use threats/actions of violence against them. (Other example: I repeatedly run across pyramid schemes. Setting up a simple, yet convincing set of facts as a website, that would keep people from being fooled into these is my initial response. But I always restrain from doing so when I look at two things: - how litigious these schemes often are (it often takes years for authorities to catch up to them) - how emotionally attached (and often shady) the scheme's propenents are)

tim333 9y ago

Not sure if its completely ideal but uk companies are cheap to set up and its hard work and costly to sue for libel.

buro9 9y ago

I run just under 300 forums on much the same basis and have been sued in the past in the UK. Feel free to co-opt my very expensive lawyer T&Cs which were designed specifically for this scenario (if you haven't actually had a lawyer draw up yours they may be a better default for you): https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal Ultimately in Europe I now feel fine: + EU e-commerce directive has "mere conduit" + Reactive moderation sets you aside from a publishing company and fits into "mere conduit" + Key thing for you is to not engage in any incidents as a participant, deny you even know that they are occurring... but if someone contacts you and tells you something is shady, etc you should shut that down ASAP - bear in mind that to some extent this does mean the admin of a forum shouldn't be an active user of the forum. So for just shutting stuff down within a reasonable time, you basically get to be very immune from any libel, defamation, slander, etc that occurs as a result of your users. Together with the change in UK law that shifted burden onto those raising a claim (they must prove actual damages - a surprisingly hard thing to do), I have not now had any legal threats in about 4 years despite still running as many forums that are barely (if at all) moderated.

alex_hitchins 9y ago
Side questions, but what sort of hardware & connectivity do you have for supporting that number of forums? I'd have thought at that level you would be in to duplicate hardware etc.
- buro9 9y ago
  Just a few linodes run them all and we tend to have low thousands of concurrent users at any time but can comfortably handle high hundreds of thousands of guests. A friend and I wrote a forum platform for them :) As a startup that didn't get anywhere, but the main premise was that forum hosting is expensive (almost 1 server per forum, not very optimised for caching, every page is dynamic, etc) due to them not being on a true platform (shared costs, optimisations, and less waste in CPU and bandwidth), and we also hypothesised that forums have a natural life and when they die they cross-pollinate new forums (total growth in user engagement across communities continues even when a single community dies)... hence it's best to make a platform, and that the reduced costs for all actually makes them financially viable (though when we shut the startup I chose non-advertising and to do donations instead). This is the forum platform: https://microco.sm https://microco.sm but it's not really open for new forums, as I manually have to enable them and I'm concerned about future offboarding requests (not something I support at all). This is an example of a forum on the platform: https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com which is the largest, but there are just shy of 300 on a wide range of topics.

philg_jr 9y ago

Any chance you can drop the name here? I'm a motorhead and my beloved community-supported mazdaspeed community has basically dried up and migrated to facebook...

codingdave 9y ago

If the suits are truly frivolous, you are fine. Threats and letters are utterly meaningless in and of themselves. No attorney will actually take a frivolous suit to court, although they will try to bully and scare your with formal letterhead and words. And if there is a real suit, being offshore won't protect you from the suit. You may be able to get it tossed out for lack of jurisdiction, and ultimately be immune from consequences, but that still means you need to either argue that point yourself it court or hire legal help to get it tossed.