SEC Charges Eleven in Stock Manipulation Ring

[lentinman]

Q&O:

"This would be correct if IHUB's boards were like yahoo where the company gives no direction or promotion. IHUB however, directs and promotes through its home page top lists, board emails, member marking, paid news exposure, IRP's ect. This has opened them up to vicarious liability to the scams, they are not just a phone. They have "assumed responsibilities" because of the promotional nature of the site."

I give credit to a reasonable argument and that is one. However, I still disagree with it.

Will it be a slight negative in a civil trial? Maybe. But, IMO it will only be so if whoever is judging them is not very knowledgeable of how the internet works or how message boards work.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a huge leap to conclude that because IHub shows raw data that it means they are promoting anything. Simply making the objective information available to their users is nothing more than 1) interesting facts or 2) open book policy. I see no way to legitimately make that into being a promotional site by IHub.

Now, if you can show where IHub encouraged people to do X or Y or Z in order to increase pump boards or boardmarks or anything of the sort, that might be different. However, I'm not aware of anything in IHub's language that would be representative of that type of mindset.

Len