Just to follow up on a story from last month, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has now officially dropped his lawsuit against Twitter. La Russa had been suing the service for someone who was pretending to be him and was seeking ““unspecified damages.” He got none of those, nor will he get anything else from the startup.
No money changed hands in the dropping of the suit. Here’s the goods from the court document:
Pursuant to Rule 41(a)(1)(A) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Plaintiff Anthony La Russa hereby dismisses with prejudice all claims in this action against Twitter, Inc., with each party to bear its own costs and attorneys’ fees. No payment was made by Twitter to La Russa in exchange for this dismissal.
Here’s why this lawsuit was rather silly. First of all, La Russa was suing Twitter rather than suing the impersonator. Even after Twitter did what it could to stop whoever it was — delete the account. But even better was that La Russa tried to claim just a few days later that Twitter had settled the case and was giving money to his charity in return. One problem: That never happened.
La Russa might actually be lucky that Twitter didn’t come back and sue him for saying that — such a statement could literally open the floodgates for more lawsuits like this if it was implied that Twitter was in the wrong.
But hey, at least all of this helped bring about verified accounts on Twitter. Lest we get another Kanye rant.
[photo: Reuters]
he probably realized nobody will care about Twitter in 2 years anyway
Alas, I just googled “Twitter” and it got 614 million results. Then, I google “God” and it got only 487 million results. Boohoo, we are all fucked.
Haha… I could see this one coming!
The law suit was ridiculous. Twitter shouldn’t be responsible for “crimes” committed on their site.
Jocks are dumb.
He does have a law degree.
Apparently it took a lawsuit to get some customer service, good job for listening twitter, my call is important.
He’s kind of a douche and I don’t hink what anyone writes about him will really harm that.
La Russa has actually done some really great things, like found the Animal Rescue Foundation (ARF).
Why was he digging for some Twitter gold ?
Did anyone else read: Swing and a Mississippi?
He probably sobered up recently and realized what’s up.
I think twitter should sue La Russa just for him wasting their time.
And then we can do a 6.769-billion people class action lawsuit against Twitter for wasting ours.
eCatalog at its best..
http://www.peto...2008_fall_70200
fyi
La Russa has a law degree.
His classic quote:
“I decided I’d rather ride the buses in the minor leagues than practice law for a living.”
Just because a lawsuit lacks grounds and thus can’t be won doesn’t mean it’s silly; not if it has another purpose. What LaRussa did was strategically sound. It’s called a shot across the bow. It got Twitter’s attention, and in the long run that’s good for the rest of us.
Awesome ..
It’s good that La Russa backed down. Although his claims had no merit, there are plenty of people who would have continued in hopes of hitting the lottery. One positive side is this brought attention to how responsive Twitter is to (famous) people who are upset others are pretending to be them.
We almost had a similar problem with twitter recently from http://www.tweexchange.com but managed to avoid any troubles going forward. Twitter seemed pretty decent to deal with during this time!
Wow…who could have seen this coming?
Jon Carroll – June 4th, 2009 at 11:20 am PDT
LaRussa asked and couldn’t get Twitter to answer his concerns, so he filed a suit…they woke up and pulled it. Seems he got action the only way he could. His suit will be pulled also. Think what you might, but sometimes it takes a squeaky wheel.