This is the traditional way of a state, now seized by a primitively power-hungry, and equally mediocre political stable, to show gratitude to its independent intellectuals: alienation, harassment and punishment.
LRN, a Los Angeles company founded by Dov Seidman, a law school graduate, sells companies Internet-based programs for such potentially litigious areas as sexual harassment and intellectual property.
Right after the company was accused of intellectual theft and sexual harassment, Kalanick apologized for a video that surfaced in which he is shown in a heated argument with an Uber driver over the company's business model.
The company is still recovering from a series of very public missteps involving payments to drivers, sexual harassment, potential intellectual property theft, bad executive behavior, and the deployment of software that allowed it to elude law enforcement.
The tone of the exchange further added fuel to an already five-alarm fire at the rideshare company, fanned in just the last week by accusations of intellectual theft, a sexual harassment claim from a former Uber engineer and a previous #deleteuber campaign — further confirming in people's minds what they already may have suspected about the rumored "bro culture" at Uber, with Kalanick at the helm.
But Section 230 has its limits, too: companies do have to respond appropriately if the material violates either federal criminal law, like in cases of child pornography, obscenity, or harassment, or intellectual property law, like copyright.
Don R. Zell, a former federal agent with the Justice Department's strike force and the Drug Enforcement Agency, leads the firm's investigative unit, which charges clients $90 to $170 an hour to do such things as look into suspected intellectual property infringements, examine sexual harassment claims, evaluate prospective merger partners and run undercover operations.
But in the wake of recent scandals ranging from alleged intellectual property theft to sexual harassment to the evasion of regulators, news broke on Sunday that Jones had left the ride-hailing giant after just six months on the job.
It was a worrying throwback to the paranoid language that suffused official rhetoric in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.Yu Jie, a dissident writer in Beijing, says the authorities have stepped up harassment of liberal intellectuals in recent months.
Uber was rocked by sexual harassment allegations, lawsuits over intellectual property theft and Justice Department investigations.
