Today, short-selling hedge fund Rocker Partners paid Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) $5-million to settle the lawsuit filed against them in August of 2005. Rocker Partners also entirely dropped its own countersuit.

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is a frequent contributor to DeepCapture.com.

This is a major victory, not only for Patrick and Overstock.com, but for all public companies targeted by bear raiding hedge funds.

But thanks to the unusually skewed reporting surrounding it, chances are you either hadn’t heard about the suit, or were under the impression it was frivolous and certain to fail.

This presentation explains part of the story behind the coverage of the suit, using some innovative methods to explain why what you heard about the suit and its merits likely had little in common with the reality of it.

As promised in the video, researchers are encouraged to find additional links within the Facebook friend lists of the short-selling hedge funds and journalists and bloggers who love them. To make the process easier, I’ve compiled this spreadsheet. If you discover anything interesting, particularly with respect to the hedge funds and reporters linked to other bear raid targets, please write about your findings it in the comment section below.

Also, very shortly I’ll be adding an interactive, dynamic relationship browser to this post, which will make it easy for you to visualize these networks.

 The stories behind the Rocker/Gradient lawsuit story [21:21m]: