Lee's Blog

In thinking about this, I thought of a couple of stories that the radio station, LBC Radio, should have thought about before launching their legal thuggery.

First, there is the story of Ray Bradbury and EC Comics. EC Comics adapted a couple of his stories into a comic. They were quite blatantly violating his copyright, but instead of hiring a pricey legal firm to threaten immediate legal action and ominously “reserve their rights against him,” he wrote them a very nice letter, complimented them on their work, and added that it seemed that they had inadvertently omitted to send him his royalty check. He knew, and they knew he knew, that they had not intended to pay a royalty, but it cost him nothing to be polite and give them a way to back down gracefully. They sent the check forthwith, but moreover they continued to adapt his stories, giving him some additional royalties and also exposure to an audience that might not otherwise have heard of him. It was a good relationship for both, which could never have come about if he’d charged in with all legal guns blazing.

Second, there is a story which I remember from history class but couldn’t find in a quick search online. Shortly before the American Revolution, the British Parliament declared, in several Acts, its right to impose on the colonies such laws and taxes as it should see fit, as it was the sovereign. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin, but I may misremember, who agreed that Parliament had the right and power to impose such laws, but sometimes it is wiser not to use your right and power. Parliament didn’t listen, and we know the result.

So, even though LBC Radio had the right and power to use their legal thuggery to force Ben Goldacre to remove the audio clip (which as I understand it really did violate their copyright), it would have been wiser not to. Had I been in their shoes, I would have sent him a polite letter or email, from a higher-up in the company, not a hired legal thug, to this effect:

We have seen your website and your comments on the recent broadcast by Jeni Barnett. We appreciate your concerns and will revisit our policies on such controversial issues. We understand your reasons for posting the entire 44 minute audio clip, since you wanted your readers to have the full flavour of her idiocy [okay, so maybe they wouldn't go that far], but our solicitors [or whatever the correct British term is in this case] tell us that you have posted more than is covered by fair use, so we must ask you to remove the clip. We welcome a debate on the issues raised, but in fairness to our investors, we must also protect our rights to our intellectual property.

Thank you for your interest in our programmes, and we hope for a fruitful exchange of ideas on this matter.

See how easy that is? If he doesn’t immediately take down the clip (but he would have, I have no doubt), then they can send in the thugs. But more likely, he will comply by taking down the clip, then post the letter or email, making the radio station look good and fair-minded. There might even be a real debate, in which people from the radio station could even participate, giving them favorable publicity instead of what they’ve got. And in the future, when he hears of one of their broadcasters being a moron, he might comment on it as a sad falling-away from their standards as opposed to just the sort of idiocy we expect as a matter of course from such slime as these.

It is sad that everyone’s first recourse these days is to threats and hostility, instead of the civil actions exemplified by Ray Bradbury. There is always the mailed fist inside the velvet glove, we know that, but it isn’t necessary to start smashing in the doors with the mailed fist as your first move. You could try a polite knock, first.

There is a storm in the science blogosphere about a dim but shrill anti-vax radio creature named Jeni Barnett (*spit*). She broadcast a thing on the radio (lacking a better term) containing a full set of standard anti-vax nonsense but with some idiocy all of her very own to boot. Links to the transcript (made by a small group of dedicated science bloggers) are at the link above.

Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science, wanted people to know exactly what she said, but was concerned that if he merely quoted her, he would be thought to be taking her words out of context and making her look bad. So he posted the entire audio. Her lawyers, understandably wanting to prevent anyone from processing the thing as a whole, and listening to each idiocy with care, threatened him. He took the audio down, of course, but the blogosphere has picked it up and spread it far and wide. Like the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*), this legal thuggery has had the effect of making people all over the world aware of what would otherwise have passed pretty much unnoticed. Certainly I would never had heard of it if not for the legal thuggery which was reported by Orac.

People with a lot more intestinal fortitude than me have posted extensively about this radio creature’s stupidity. But I will mention my favorite parts of the transcript:

Now back in the day (and that’s an expression I’ve learned from my [unclear] son), back in the day, children got measles, children got mumps. I’m not suggesting – I am not suggesting – that we got backwards where some children, where we have one in fifteen children die of it. And that one person in fifteen is the one we have to be looking at and wondering why and dealing with it.

…

Is there something wrong with having mumps, is there something – you know is it – most people aren’t that one in fifteen.

Well, duh (speaking at a radio creature level).

I mean, anybody who is in a position to listen to her isn’t that one in fifteen. Not only that, but we aren’t even descended from that one in fifteen. All of our ancestors managed to live past their childhoods, at least into very young adulthood, or they would not have had children and thus would not be our ancestors. Why should we care if one child in fifteen dies? They aren’t us after all. And I’m sure it’s a great consolation to their parents to be told that we don’t care if their children die, so why should they?

An actual practicing nurse, the sort who deals with dying children, called in. You can read the transcript of the conversation here. The radio creature calls Yasmin vicious, but I don’t see anyone being vicious in this segment but the creature herself. Yasmin says the broadcast is extremely irresponsible, which is true; that it is not based on any facts, which is true; that people like this radio creature are responsible for the on-going measles epidemic in England, which is true; and that there are children who can’t get immunized or whose immune systems are weak because of something like chemotherapy, who are at risk of dying of measles caught from unimmunized children around them, which is true. Her most cogent comment are these:

So you really need to think about what you’re doing here and why you’re doing it.

…

You should think about what you’re doing in this programme. You’re doing a lot of damage. A lot of damage.

Of course the response to the second comment was, “Well, maybe. I don’t think so.” Yeah, well, that’s because she’s an ignorant moron spouting assertions that she doesn’t understand and that she learned from other people just as ignorant.

I will add that this radio creature claims to be merely arrogantly ignorant instead of actively vile::

I am not a scientist, I would not claim to be a scientist. When tested on the contents of the MMR vaccine I told the truth. I did not have the facts to hand. Was I ill informed? Yes.As a responsible broadcaster I should have been better prepared as a parent, however, I can fight my corner. I don’t know everything that goes into cigarettes but I do know they are harmful.

As a professional should I have been better prepared – YES – but the discussion took off in a direction I hadn’t expected when I received a vicious phone call from a Nurse I was utterly thrown. I won’t get thrown again.

Gloat, gloat, gloat!

The legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*) has been sanctioned!

The Court spanked him but good, too:

The subpoena which I have attached to this order is breathtakingly broad. Mr. Shoemaker made no attempt to avoid imposing an undue burden or expense on Ms. Seidel. To the contrary, I find that he sought to burden her by requiring production of every scrap of paper related to autism, her web site, her tax returns, and her communications with the government. He improperly imposes a requirement to create documents, e.g., a list of “names of persons helping, paying or facilitating . . . these endeavors.” The documentation sought is exhaustive.

Shoemaker has not offered a shred of evidence to support his speculations. He has, he says, had his suspicions aroused because she has so much information. Clearly he is unfamiliar with the extent of the information which a highly-competent librarian like Ms. Seidel can, and did, accumulate. If Shoemaker wanted to know if Ms. Seidel was in part supported by or provided information by Bayer, he could have inquired of Bayer or limited the Seidel subpoena to that information. Instead he issued the subpoena calling for production of documents and a deposition on the day before he stipulated to dismiss the underlying suit with prejudice. His failure to withdraw the subpoena when he clearly knew that suit was over is telling about his motives. His efforts to vilify and demean Ms. Seidel are unwarranted and unseemly. [Emphasis added]

And then there’s the sanction:

As a sanction from this court, Clifford J. Shoemaker is ordered to attend within three months, a continuing legal education program on ethics and on the discovery rules in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. He is ordered to file a certification of completion of the programs.

Go back to school, Orc, and learn how to conduct yourself like a lawyer.

Sadly, this probably won’t have any effect on this Orc’s behavior. Continuing legal education is just a “show-up” sort of thing. You just have to be physically present and non-disruptive in order to get credit. There is no homework; there are no exams.

If it had been me, I’d have ordered him to take a class on Legal Ethics at an accredited law school, and not show his face in the New Hampshire courts until he passed that class and the legal ethics exam required before one can be admitted to the Bar. Though I suppose the judge didn’t actually have the power to order that. The Virginia State Bar could do something like that, though. One can dream …

The legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*) has been quashed!

And it’s not just that Kathleen is off the hook; Shoemaker (*spit*) has been ordered to show cause why he should not be sanctioned. Good luck with that.

The funny thing is that some people are still defending Shoemaker (*spit*). Like this one on Orac’s blog:

Devil’s advocacy here – if you legitimately thought that there was a Big Government – Big Business conspiracy (and really, who doesn’t suspect some form of this somewhere?), isn’t this the type of documents you might expect to “catch” evidence from? If this was a lawyer with a suit about misappropriation of funds for the Iraq war, we wouldn’t think twice about a list like this. The reason we don’t react the same way here is that we know that there’s no there there, no conspiracy to find, but the nutty lawyer maybe doesn’t.

Well, no. Why would I expect to “catch” evidence about, say, misappropriation of funds for the Iraq war, by trolling through a random blogger’s correspondence with people whose blogs are listed on her blog roll? Or her communications with her physician? Or with charities and religious organizations? Really, if there were a giant conspiracy to conceal something, which was so effective that I wasn’t able to find any documentation anywhere, why on earth would I expect to “catch” evidence that was let slip to a random blogger? That’s what’s so silly about the subpoena.

So, I was procrastinating rather than do taxes and checking Google some more about the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*), and found this one. It ends with “We’ll talk about it in class next week.”

As ERV would say … nom, nom, nom. A group of enthusiastic students discussing all the flaws in this subpoena. I wonder if any of them have blogs??

Shoemaker (*spit*) is an Orc. And if Orcs don’t like the association, they can eat him.

So I was wondering how much of an effect the blogosphere’s reaction to the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*) was having on Google.

If you just google “Clifford Shoemaker” (*spit*), the number one result is a funeral home (and I’ll bet they’re thrilled to share his name), then there are two blurbs about him as a lawyer, another funeral home result, and then six blog posts about his legal thuggery. The next ten contain two about the funeral home, two about him as a lawyer, one I’m not sure about, and five about his legal thuggery.

If you google lawyer “Clifford Shoemaker” (*spit*), all of the first ten entries are about this. Out of the first twenty, just two are not about this. And in the first thirty, there are just five not about this, one of which is the unfortunate funeral home. Interestingly, one of the four about Shoemaker (*spit*) appears to be a lawsuit against him by former clients. The link is to an order upholding dismissal of the case, but it seems that by this point in the litigation, the suit against him had been dismissed or settled, because his role is not discussed at all in the order, in my quick reading. But it’s interesting, anyway.

In the 31-40 range, we have a link to this:

How about Mr. Clifford Shoemaker’s attempt to intimidate those who continue to point out that he is making money by lying to his clients about the cause of autism and lying to courts about science?

Shoemaker knows that the Sykes family does not have a case and that Ms. Seidel has absolutely nothing to do with the case, but that didn’t stop him from acting in a way that will make trial lawyers embarrassed to be associated with him. Disbar, draw and quarter him.

Comment by freelunch – April 4, 2008 at 8:45 pm

That’s my kind of guy. But that means Wall Street Journal knew about this for six days before finally putting it in Best of the Web Today, and I don’t like that.

Sniff. That was so moving.

So the tale of the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*) continues. Nothing more will happen until April 17, I guess. I can’t decide if I expect him to double down and try to respond to the motion to quash, or tuck tail and let the subpoena be quashed without more humiliation to him.

Either way he’s an Orc. And if Orcs don’t like the association, they can eat him.

To my eternal shame, I have a law degree and actually practiced law for years. I worked for a very honest and reputable firm, and to the best of our ability, everything we did was of the highest legal and ethical standards. But I really didn’t enjoy practicing law (it’s just basically not my thing; I prefer computers to people), and I really, really hated the fact that people thought just because I was a lawyer, I must be like … Clifford Shoemaker *spit*.

Well, I wasn’t. And I’m not. I got a job as a computer programmer, which I love, and I resigned from the Bar. So I am not a lawyer and never will be again. So don’t anyone ever, ever, ever think that I am anything like that unmitigated swine (no offense intended to swine) Clifford *spit* Shoemaker *spit*.

The only thing that would be useful about my having a law degree would be having the ability to help Kathleen Seidel against that subhuman slug (no offense intended to slugs) Clifford *spit* Shoemaker *spit*. But unfortunately I have been away from the law too long and never practiced in federal court anyway.

Maybe I should call Clifford *spit* Shoemaker *spit* an Orc. Orcs cannot be offended by the comparison, unlike slugs, swine, and bottom-feeding scum-suckers, all of whom would have every right to object to being compared to this … this … words fail me … this lawyer.