Dr Matthew Garrett v Dr Roy Schestowitz and Anor

> In my judgment, in all these circumstances, the minimum sum necessary to convince a fair-minded bystander of the baselessness of the allegations against him, to vindicate his reputation and restore his standing, and to compensate him for the consequences he has suffered, is £70,000.

Can anyone confirm whether it is (or was?) really a respectable/serious free software site?

The original claim: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Claims.pdf

The defence and counterclaim: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Defence_Counterclaim.pdf

The associated schedule of harassment: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Schedule.pdf

The reply to the defence and counterclaim: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/Reply.pdf

> Dr Garrett is chiefly accused of an online campaign of material which is (variously) criminal, illegal or offensive. The criminal matters alleged include cybercrime, hate crime, blackmail, issuing threats of violence or death, and matters adjacent to terrorism. Other illegal matters alleged include defamation, harassment and online abuse. Offensive matters alleged include material that is variously racist, antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic or otherwise hateful or discriminatory, sexually incontinent, or drugs-related. Dr Garrett is alleged to have waged this campaign through the medium of IRC ‘sockpuppet’ accounts – accounts under pseudonymous user nicknames intended to be a vehicle for distributing material anonymously and deniably. Many posts from these accounts are reproduced in the articles complained of. Dr Garrett is also repeatedly alleged to be an uncontrolled user of illegal class A drugs, principally crack cocaine.

The evidence for the allegations was apparently very thin (¶¶59–60):

> First, the defence relies on an incident a few years prior to the sockpuppet campaign, in which Dr Garrett admittedly registered himself online in two borrowed names for the purpose of making a rhetorical or satirical point about the owner of those names. Dr Garrett’s evidence is that he did so openly, and with the knowledge of the owner (who had himself vacated the names in order to borrow another user’s nickname – which was in part Dr Garrett’s point in also doing so). Dr Schestowitz clearly takes exception to that particular piece of theatricality as a major breach of netiquette in its own right, and regards it as a sign or symptom of propensity for sockpuppetry. But the incident in question, on its face, is plainly something quite different from the covert use of sockpuppet accounts to publish illegal or offensive material, and is not in my judgment capable of indicating any sort of propensity to do that.

> Second, it is said there was an incident in which Dr Garrett’s own named account and one of the sockpuppet accounts experienced simultaneous dropped connections. If established, that could indicate dual operation by a single individual. The evidence from the Claimant is that the dropped connections were not in fact simultaneous. I have no evidential basis for doing otherwise than proceeding on that basis. This pleading cannot in the circumstances support an inference of Dr Garrett’s authorship of the sockpuppet posts.

¶¶61–75 have further, even weaker evidence.

> Mr Hamer referred to what he considered to be racist attacks on Dr Garrett’s lawyers, posted on Techrights, which he described as probably the worst example he had seen of such conduct.

So these people's response to getting sued was to make racist comments about the person suing them's lawyer?!

Keeping it classy.

https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/3063#lv...

Defendants Roy and Rianne Schestowitz were the targets of online harassment. They decided that claimant Matthew Garrett was behind it, and initiated their own hate campaign against him, in particular using their websites www.techrights.org and news.tuxmachines.org to do so.

The defendants did a very poor job of going to court, even by the standards of amateurs representing themselves, producing almost no evidence, none of which the judge found to be relevant.

Damages of £70K were awarded.

He was not a popular figure even back then, for reasons of his own making.

>This is a dispute between prominent ‘free software movement’ activists. The free software movement advances a philosophy and practice which values the freedom of users to create and share software enabling internet access, and challenges the dominance of ‘big tech’ software and systems over the online experience. That includes a preference for internet relay chat (‘IRC’), an online instant messaging system dating in origin from the 1990s, over the big social media platforms. The challenge the free software movement makes is not only of a technical, but also of a social, economic or ethical nature, and it espouses some wider sets of values accordingly

If this is how I feel about a discredited and largely uninfluential website, one can only imagine how Matthew feels given how widely read the unhinged claims on tuxmachines were against him.