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I've found it impossible to find thorough, unbiased reading material about the Alex Jones/Sandy Hook trial. My take is "what he did shouldn't be illegal, but if it is, wouldn't removing the content from the internet and issuing a retraction be enough?" I'd appreciate some reading material if anyone has any.
At the very minimum he should also apologise for blatantly lying and inventing conspiracy theories about their dead children and refund costs caused by his lying.
And also some reasonable compensation (maybe about 10 000 000 $ per slandered person?).
Why $10M is reasonable? I mean, spreading vile lies is without doubt despicable, but $10M is more than life earnings of most Americans, and that not taking into account future value discounts. Basically, it's a sum that moves you to a category of "never has to work again unless you want to" and maybe the same for their family (depending on the size). I could understand if that was presented as "reasonable punishment" - this is a ruinous amount for the liar, and if you want to ensure nobody lies in such manner ever, it's reasonable to use a huge fine to ensure that. However, as a compensation, I do not understand why it is reasonable that a person who was a victim of a lie (admittedly, a very vile and disgusting one, but still one lie), should instantly become top 1% rich just because of it? I mean, if they suffered huge economic or physical losses because of the lie, I'd understand this, but did they suffer losses like that?
First, it was hardly "one lie."
Second, why does it matter whether someone becomes top 1% rich, if that is in fact fair compensation for what they suffered. There are plenty of people, after all, who would refuse any amount of money to be subjected to what some of those parents were subjected to. Either the monetary compensation was commensurate with their damages, or it was not. Whether it puts them in the top 1% or 10% or 0.001% is not relevant.
Finally, everyone seems to be forgetting that Jones presumably profited from telling those lies -- that is, after all, why he said them. At the very least, a tortfeasor who profits from his tort should be forced to disgorge those profits, which in this case might well exceed $10 million.
It does matter because compensation is meant to restore and repair the harm that was done to you. If you never were a multimillionaire, you can not honestly claim to restore harm done to you you should become one. When it's grievous bodily harm (say, you lose your hand, or get cancer) it may be different, because loss of life or quality of life is very hard to repair with money, and even to approach it one needs a lot of money. But here it's not the case, that's why I am questioning the reasonableness. And surely the percentile matters - otherwise how would you know if $10M is a lot or not? Money is a social thing, so to know how much money is $10M you need to look at the society. Maybe in some society even $1000 would be a huge sum of money, but in ours it's not a lot. To have this measure, we need to use percentiles.
That's my point - I don't see how $10M is commensurate.
That's not a good argument, since that implies infinite compensation for anything that I would never agree to do voluntarily. Let's say I hate you very much, and would never agree to give you my car for a ride, not even for a billion of dollars, I am very stubborn this way. You break into my house one day and take my car for a ride. No harm done to the house or the car, but I feel very bad about it. Does it entitle me to a compensation over a billion dollars? I don't think most people would agree to that as a reasonable approach.
That's different from a compensation. Compensation is measured against damages, not profits. If you said the court should take all Jones' profits gained from his lies (let's imagine it is possible to figure it out) and distribute it equally between the victims - that would be a different thing, but that's not what you said.
Claim that the same harassment is more damaging to richer people is absurd. If anything, richer people have more ability to shield from harassment.
I never claimed anything like that. I claimed that if you weren't rich and then became rich, it's not "making your whole", it's much more than that. Your statement of "same harassment is more damaging to richer people" is indeed absurd, but I never claimed anything like it.
And my claim is that just compensation for attack on you can be much greater than entire net worth before being harassed.
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