Eric Goldman is an associate professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law and directs that school's High Tech Law Institute. You can read more of his work at his Technology & Marketing Law Blog.
Redmond is the company behind Peep Telephony, a service that claimed to offer free cellular phone service through the power of mesh networking. A week after the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, Gizmodo.com published an article, “Smoke & Mirrors: The Greatest Scam in Tech,” about Peep Telephony. In addition to using the word “scam” in the title, the article had lots of denigrating things to say about Peep and about Redmond’s prior initiatives. (The opinion (PDF) lays out the beefs, although some of the hot spots are apparent from a quick review of the initial article). Gizmodo subsequently published Redmond’s rebuttals. Later, Redmond apparently decided the rebuttal wasn’t enough and asked Gizmodo to remove both articles, which Gizmodo declined to do. Redmond then sued Gizmodo’s parent company Gawker Media for defamation. The court dismisses the case on anti-SLAPP grounds, and that means Redmond will owe a check to Gawker for this lawsuit.
The court has no problem finding that Peep Telephony’s activities were a matter of public interest. Peep Telephony received some high-profile coverage from technology reporters before Gizmodo’s story, and Redmond apparently had been trying to stir up press coverage in advance of the 2011 CES conference. The court summarizes that the “Gizmodo article was a warning to a segment of the public—consumers and investors in the tech community—that Redmond‘s claims about his latest technology were not credible.”
The court also says that Redmond’s beefs relate to statements of opinion, not fact. The court notes that the word “scam” is not a factual assertion (a dicey outcome), the article was written in a “casual” and “sarcastic” first-person style (“the article‘s general tenor and language would give a reasonable reader the impression the authors were expressing subjective opinions, not reporting facts”), and the article used weasel words, such as “seems,” “arguably,” “looks like,” etc., to qualify key fact-like assertions.