One, the women were far from litigious (depends on your definition of course but to me taking a year and using everything from humor to begging in an attempt to resolve the case without going to litigation is the opposite of litigious).
Two, they did not have the resources to sue the posters - unless I misunderstood the article, Google's legal firm is representing them for free because Google wants to have control over any legal precedents that affect their ability to index non-moderated online forums.
There is nothing funny about being accused of all kinds of stuff by anonymous individuals, it can do very real harm.
If the perps had been identified, do you think they would have even written all that stuff ? And if they had not then they would not have been pursued.
To claim that they are going overboard is to take away from them the one defense that they have, which is to sue the site owners to get to the data they need to be able to go after those that actually 'did it'.
Sure, they set out to make an example of the people that committed these acts, but that's fine by me.
I can imagine some people's thought processes: Because supposed some of it might be true, right? People wouldn't write that stuff if it was false, would they?
A lot of this is because of good search and indexing techniques by Google and their ilk (and people wanting advertising revenue and opening up their sites to the spiders), because even a few years this stuff that wouldn't have been found at all, and would be a hurricane in a taecup. But, today I think it is a problem as this kind of crap has the possibility to seriously harm people's reputation.
But, there is a world of difference between what I morally shouldn't do, and what I legally can't do.
I think the Ku Klux Klan is horrible for spouting its bigoted hate speach about minorities - but I don't think we should make it illegal for them to do so.
I (and the law) are in agreement that straight up libel, slander, obscenity, and calls to violence are not protected by free speech, but pretty much everything else is.
By definition, an opinion can't be false (it's my opinion) - and you really don't want a court legislating which opinions someone should be allowed to express. You can be sued for outright lying (slander/libel), but you can not (and should not) be sued for stating an opinion. No matter how ill conceived or malicious that opinion is.
From a technical point of view if AutoAdmit had blocked search spiders from indexing their forums (or at least the scandalous ones) none of this would have happened in the first place.
Why yes. Yes they do.
Flaming is ok, but calling for these women to be raped and so on is just disturbing and weird and anyone doing it is a bit far from a decent person in any context.
Decent people get caught up in (bad) events all the time. There's the Stanford prison experiment, where students were separated into guards & prisoners with horrifying results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
This probably isn't a good comparison, but it's an example of decent people doing bad things and following a crowd or mob mentality. There's probably some sociology term for it, where "normal" people act in un-normal vile ways.
In this case, many of the commentors appear to be male and got caught up in cussing out women (or were acting like bullies). Someone started it, and it snowballed into vile and derogatory language. I'm not condoning their actions, but things like can and do happen all the time, and without intervention escalate.
The article only acknowledges this at the very end: "But many other posts, however cruel, might not be seen as extreme or outrageous enough to lose their First Amendment protection. As for defamation, the overwhelming majority of the comments could be construed as opinions, which are protected."
These women are going way overboard, and abusing the court system (and the fact that they have sufficient resources to legally harass posters) to get what they want. Frankly, because of their litigious behavior, I don't think I would ever hire either of them.