I don’t “own” The Standard

Written By: - Date published: 5:20 pm, May 10th, 2016 - 44 comments
Categories: admin, The Standard - Tags:

Can I point out to the media, Cameron Slater, and for that matter the legal dimwits at the West Auckland site Lauda Finem.

I don’t own The Standard. I haven’t even owned the domain name for more than 6 years. I used to own the domain up until 2010. But that was signed over in that year to be the property of The Standard Trust.

Statements from Cameron Slater and repeated in the media like this are quite inaccurate

Slater sought a court order to keep his name and the details of this case secret forever. However Newshub and others, including the owner of The Standard, fought him in court and won.

Read the about.

Who are you?

We’re a cooperative who saw a gap in the New Zealand political blogosphere and decided that we should have a go at filling it here at The Standard blog site. We write here in our personal capacities and the opinions that are expressed on the blog are individual unless expressly stated otherwise (see the policy). We do not write on behalf of any organization. Legally this website is owned by The Standard Trust, an entity set up by the authors to own The Standard’s url and handle any advertising revenue.

This has essentially been the statement on the site since 2010 – read the Wayback Engine. The Standard Trust has Mike Smith and myself as trustees and was formed to take control of any revenue and donations on behalf of the site and for the authors and commenters who make up its community.

I am neither the publisher (except for my own posts and occasional comments) or even the editor of the site. We have a pile of ‘editors’. I am one of its two administrators with complete rights over the site itself. Since I run the hardware and software for the site, I am also its sysop or system operator or its ISP.

Now I know that Cameron Slater likes to present himself as some kind of an expert on The Standard. But to put it frankly, he has no idea about the site and appears to be guided more by paranoia and the morally repugnant way that he himself operates. He appears to have never even read the about.

After all he seems to think that there are secrets on my home server and in The Standard’s files that we keep concealed.

Sure we do. But we also say exactly what is concealed and why. The secrets and the reasons for them are described in our about and in our privacy policy which extends the same protection to the people who comment.

Why don’t you say who you are?

Some of the authors here use their real names, but others choose to blog under a pseudonym for a variety of reasons. Some of us have professional reasons for doing so, others of us are reluctant to expose ourselves to the kind of personal threats sometimes made online. Those of us using pseudonyms discussed this issue long and hard before we began and came down on the side of anonymity. We hope you can see why. You might also want to contemplate the implications of this link.

The link is to a post from back in 2008 describing Cameron Slater acting like a stupid anti-social arsehole disclosing peoples addresses. It followed a number of previous incidents and shows his path to subsequent incidents.

His repeated idiotic anti-social and often unlawful behaviours ultimately lead to 9 convictions for breaching name suppression. It also led directly to the book “Dirty Politics” after someone got pissed off enough at him to hack his computers after he gloated about the tragic death of a west coaster..

Of course this career criminal still hasn’t learnt. This morning, he breached name suppression again by issuing a statement early via the West Auckland website Lauda Finem.

In eight and half years neither The Standard Trust nor I have been convicted or taken diversion for anything in criminal or civil court. Unlike Cameron Slater and some other bloggers, we don’t deliberately or even by accident break any laws.

Sure I am for the first time having to deal with a legal fool in court who seems to think, like some media, that I am the site. Apparently this close mate of Cameron Slater’s also hasn’t read our about. Probably he was the one on Lauda Finem who was stupid enough to put up the name suppression violating notice from Cameron Slater this morning.

 

44 comments on “I don’t “own” The Standard ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Ad 1
    10 May 2016 at 6:04 pm

    Will you hold a specific fundraising event for the legal costs?

  2. lprent 2
    10 May 2016 at 6:28 pm

    Probably at some point if I and the lawyers wind up short after collecting court costs.

    But since the fool decided to make the allegations against me personally, I’ve been paying for it personally rather than running it through the site.

    The real costly part of it has been taking time off work to go to court to watch a legal fool trying to reach the legal intelligence of a chimpanzee. It has been rather funny.

    The last time I saw something quite this stupid was when I read the appeal court performance of Cameron Slater. It inspired me to write “Cameron Slater has a idiot for a lawyer” and its sequel “The comical farce of Cameron Slater et al”

    But I think that The Standard Trust probably needs to accumulate some funds. As well as the illegal attacks on the site, we seem to be having more legal exposure from the monkeys of the right.

    • Ad 2.1
      10 May 2016 at 6:30 pm

      Would be good to organise an event.
      Mickey would set one up in Auckland I’m sure. 😊

    • Visubversa 2.2
      10 May 2016 at 7:57 pm

      You could have sold tickets to the Court hearings!

    • greywarshark 2.3
      11 May 2016 at 1:23 pm

      lprent
      I take it that the Standard Trust would be pleased to receive some donations through the usual donation button? So as to build a useful amount for future need.

      • r0b 2.3.1
        11 May 2016 at 1:30 pm

        Just in case lprent doesn’t catch this comment, I will reply that I’m sure the Trust greatly appreciates any and all donations.

  3. Richardrawshark 3
    10 May 2016 at 6:31 pm

    You may not own it lprent but your kind of chief whip cracker here and possession is 9/10th law or something.

    I see your statement is to stop this sort of assumption. I hope it works for you, I feel however a severe thrashing with a rather heavy piece of wood wouldn’t drum anything into the mixed up fools head. he’s got mental health issues, the sad thing is he actually has an audience for his warped opinions, it’s all sad.

    If someone kept doing that I suppose i’d end up taking a restraining order if possible, or talking to the police and see if they can if he continues place up in front of the judge for contempt judges tend to not like being ignored or disobeyed.

    He’ll learn, eventually. Till then, smile at the world of pain he keeps digging himself into there is only him to blame.

    • lprent 3.1
      10 May 2016 at 6:38 pm

      You may not own it lprent but your kind of chief whip cracker here and possession is 9/10th law or something.

      That may be the case. But most of that gets exerted at the technical side from the server, software and defenses against spambots and hackers.

      I deliberately seldom interfere very often in the operations of the site outside of offering my opinions and moderating out the worst of behaviour. I haven’t done so for 8 and half years. Most of the complaints from authors are that I don’t exert the power that I could do (on their behalf). There are even recent posts the effectively bemoan that, along with aggravated twittering.

      Hopefully my now very occasional posts and comments do have some influence. And I know that my comments sometimes do. I can see the effects over time in the million plus comments.

      Cameron hasn’t learnt in the more than eight years since I became aware of him.

      He is still a stupid idiotic hypocrite who declaims the things that are done to him that he does to others.

  4. NZJester 4
    10 May 2016 at 6:43 pm

    The only time I think Cameron reads things is when he is poring over his site looking to delete old comments that contradict his current assertions about past events .
    Unfortunately for him there are ways to retrieve his old comments that he tries to hide. Well unless he tries to pull off a Cactus Kate and get his old posting removed from public viewing on caches storing copies of old internet websites and documents.

  5. One Anonymous Bloke 5
    10 May 2016 at 6:50 pm

    I’d like to say that I own The Standard, and that everything you’ve ever read here is true. All of it.

    In the meantime here are Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra.

    • joe90 5.1
      10 May 2016 at 8:42 pm

      The melody’s dumb, repeat and repeat
      But if you can swing, it’s got a good beat
      And that’s the main thing, to make it complete
      ‘Cause everyone’s swingin’ today

  6. Richardrawshark 6
    10 May 2016 at 6:57 pm

    Thanks Lprent I realized your sysop status, having been a sysop many times I know how you can get caught up being taken for the site owner and responsible for it’s content. Sysops are but not to the degree some seem to think.

    My opinion of Cameron is that, as he suffers from depression, he’s battling his own depressed beliefs and until he finds the right combination of medication and starts taking them properly he won’t get better.

    I see a little of how I was in him before we finally found a med that hit the right neural receptors and I snapped out of it. Somehow his anger and frustrations even though directed badly it reminds me of how twisted and sick I can get as a manic – depressive.

    god knows why I have sympathy for him. his ramblings are sick. am I ok?

  7. infused 7
    10 May 2016 at 7:20 pm

    From a legal point of view, I’d say you likely own it since it’s hosted at your house, off your own internet connection on a linux box you have root access too, replacing parts of the server that you have bought. Unless all that has changed recently?

    whoa unbanned… sure that won’t last long.

    • Hanswurst 7.1
      10 May 2016 at 7:22 pm

      Is “The Standard” the server hardware, or the content?

      • infused 7.1.1
        10 May 2016 at 7:27 pm

        thats a good point. I see it as the server and whatever is on it. That’s generally how the police see if. For instance, if illegal material was uploaded to thestandard, they’d be hitting lprent up as that’s how the police see it.

        • lprent 7.1.1.1
          10 May 2016 at 9:14 pm

          Hard for them to do so when I made it perfectly clear that the reason I was making a statement and complaining was because it was my PERSONAL server.

      • infused 7.1.2
        10 May 2016 at 7:34 pm

        Also note, lprent posted this on the other thread:

        “I really wasn’t aware that there were any arseholes around willing to pay for trying to hack into my home computer.”

        Hacking TheStandard… think that’s enough there tbh.

        • lprent 7.1.2.1
          10 May 2016 at 7:47 pm

          For Cameron to be sure he’d gotten what he was after, he’d have had to have gone far deeper than the website. For a starter there wasn’t anything there. And Cameron is a paranoid sociopath. He truly believes that everyone else is an arsehole like he is

          He would have kept looking outside of the 120 GB of TS into the 8 terabytes of the rest of that server, and the 4 terabytes of my workstation.

          • infused 7.1.2.1.1
            10 May 2016 at 7:52 pm

            linux isos? 😉

            • lprent 7.1.2.1.1.1
              10 May 2016 at 7:56 pm

              Of course. That is where I usually do most of my work. Windows actually works well in vmware workstation.

          • greywarshark 7.1.2.1.2
            10 May 2016 at 9:06 pm

            About Cameron. I blame the parents. Fancy having National Party officials or mutant followers as parents. CYF should be intervening at an early age to avoid the continuance of this vicious inhuman cycle of poverty of intellect and civility.

      • lprent 7.1.3
        10 May 2016 at 8:48 pm

        Is “The Standard” the server hardware, or the content?

        The content and some software.

        The only hardware that The Standard has ever brought was some offsite backup SSDs. The software is all free open source except for some wordpress plugins.

        The site pays a major contribution to my UFB data. That is because it both uses most of the data and requires the headroom data when the site peaks in periods like election month.

        I had this server and its ancestors for decades before I put The Standard on it (several times).

        The storage on it consists of 8192 GB for me, and 120 GB for The Standard.

        What do you think?

        • Hanswurst 7.1.3.1
          10 May 2016 at 10:41 pm

          I would have assumed that “The Standard” was, as you say, the content (hadn’t occurred to me to include the software, although it’s obvious now that you mention it). That’s why I put it as a rhetorical question to Infused. Insofar as I’m not versed in the legal side of it, it was also an honest question, to which you revised a very clear answer, thank you.

    • millsy 7.2
      11 May 2016 at 12:14 am

      Who’s to say that LP doesnt lease his server space/equipment to the Standard Trust for a pepper corn rate?

      The same as people leasing server space?

  8. alwyn 8
    10 May 2016 at 7:23 pm

    There has been so much posted here about trusts I may have got completely confused. On the other hand someone who doesn’t actually know the law may have posted something that has stuck hardest in my memory. I am certainly not a lawyer.

    If Mike Smith and yourself are the trustees of The Standard Trust doesn’t that make you both, in law, the owners of whatever is in the trust?
    If so, are you both not, in law, the owners of the website “The Standard”?

    [lprent: No and No. The ‘owners’ of any trust are the beneficiaries. In this case some software, content and the people who contribute to it as authors. ]

    • infused 8.1
      10 May 2016 at 7:29 pm

      That’s why trusts can be good protection.

    • One Anonymous Bloke 8.2
      10 May 2016 at 7:40 pm

      Don’t worry: help is at hand. Say goodbye to your ignorance (if not your confusion) with all new* Google Search.

      *terms and conditions apply

      • alwyn 8.2.1
        10 May 2016 at 7:46 pm

        I am neither more knowledgeable nor less ignorant from that link.
        Thanks, but no thanks. I see why Geoff Palmer liked being on the Law Commission so much. You could talk and talk and talk and talk ……

    • lprent 8.3
      10 May 2016 at 7:59 pm

      The Trust itself is a legal entity in its own right. We don’t have a publisher or prime editor role except for what people post themselves.

      One of the crucial things to do with legal entities to to actually take actions against the right one.

      The Standard Trust wasn’t set up to fight off legal challenges. But it appears that when dealing with a fool who doesn’t read, it does a pretty good job.

    • alwyn 8.4
      10 May 2016 at 11:42 pm

      Thank you for the response.
      I’ll accept your word for it. I simply get confused when I read things like the second sentence in this comment
      “A trust is a legal structure where the person setting it up (settlor) settles assets or property, which are to be applied for the benefit of beneficiaries. Trust assets are owned and managed by trustees on behalf of the beneficiaries”
      This is from http://www.streetsmartgroup.co.nz/smart_services/business/smart_questions/decide_if_i_need_a_family_trust_
      and seemed to be saying the trustees “Owned” the assets, not the beneficiaries.

      I really don’t understand how someone who didn’t provide them or benefit from them can “own” them.
      I can’t really say I am that interested in the subject. I have no interest in setting up a trust for anything so I haven’t really wasted any time on the topic.

      • lprent 8.4.1
        11 May 2016 at 7:24 pm

        The ownership of the assets of the trust resides in the beneficiaries. The trust exercises the ownership rights and management of them on their behalf. The trustees must operate according to the trust rules laid down when it was set up or amended in accordance to those rules.

        The classic instance is with under age children. You really don’t want to give them ownership of a million dollars unless you really want to see some interesting spending.

        What is hard to understand about that?

        In our case it was recognized that the domain name and the site were of value both as an asset and as a source of potential revenue to run an increasingly expensive site. Rather than leaving the ownership residing solely in my hands, I donated them to the authors of The Standard and we set up a trust to hold and manage those assets.

        The authors of the time (some are still active) grabbed Mike Smith as a trustee as he had retired as the long serving General Secretary or the Labour Party. I gather that the general feeling at the time was that anyone who had done that was capable of corralling cats (and me). Plus we were mature enough to hang around for a while.

        😈 The authors in the early years were pretty young by my standards 7 years ago.

  9. adam 9
    10 May 2016 at 9:01 pm

    All this is proving to me is that the establishment is more interested in punishing whistle-blowers rather than criminals.

    I thought paying to have someone preform crime was a serious offence, did not know you could get diversion for it, actually hard pressed to remember anyone getting diversion with a crime that has a minimum sentence of 7 years. Hard pressed. If anyone can tell me of another case I would be interested.

    On the plus side, we did learn today that nepotism is alive and well in New Zealand. That if Daddy is connected, you can be the criminal you always wanted to be.

    Remember this is the only person our PM has apologised too. This is the guy who joked about having a journalist killed, and the guy who just walked free from a minimum of 7 years in prison – because police management felt if he apologised for paying for a crime to hack the standard, then that was OK.

    The irony is slug boy brought this upon himself with the ugly comment about the pike river family members son who died tragically in an accident. Has anyone thought about that, thought about all the families this guy has hurt? What about the police?

    Were is the police union in all this? Are they not worried that once again, when things like this go down, it just makes them look like a joke? How can the police do their job when there is obviously two laws – one law for the majority, and the other were certain cops (management), are they to intercede – handing out free passes to rich daddies boys? And how are the police doing with their pathetic, and criminally low pay rise over the last two years? Oh and your bosses let a criminal walk, how does that make you feel?

    • DoublePlusGood 9.1
      10 May 2016 at 10:16 pm

      Someone at my school some time ago was making fake IDs for cash, was busted and could have done up to seven years, but got diversion for it.

      • adam 9.1.1
        11 May 2016 at 8:52 pm

        Thanks for that DoublePlusGood.

        If your young and it’s your first offence, then I’m more than happy to see diversion used.

        But, I’m at a loss to anyone with a criminal record as long as Slaters – getting diversion on such a serious charge – still open to hearing more people offering cases.

    • greywarshark 9.2
      11 May 2016 at 10:50 am

      “Were is the police union in all this? Are they not worried that once again, when things like this go down, it just makes them look like a joke?

      Wrong word adam. This is far more serious than that phrase ‘look like a joke”. Being laughed at or scorned is for slipping on a banana skin when in uniform. This is a flagrant and serious screwing of our justice system with police misusing their discretion.

      • adam 9.2.1
        11 May 2016 at 8:49 pm

        At that point I tried to tone it down a bit. But I agree greywarshark, this undermines trust in the system – which is brittle at best.

        I do wonder at the factions inside the police though – some are peeved at this, others are elated, and more still just want to do their job and go home for the night.

  10. Too funny 10
    10 May 2016 at 9:30 pm

    You have such an over inflated opinion of yourself it’s not even funny.

  11. Philj 11
    11 May 2016 at 8:24 am

    Thank you Iprent for all your work. Peace, truth and justice for all.

  12. Rich 12
    11 May 2016 at 10:02 am

    Who is the beneficiary of this trust and who is the executor/so?