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Charter School Firm Attacks Online Criticism
Lane writes "News-Press.com reports that 'Charter Schools USA
is
threatening legal action against parents who use an Internet discussion
board to air grievances about Gateway Charter.'" This despite comments which the parents say are based on the public record, and posted anonymously.
Cease and desist letters are basically a warning. You send them to the person saying you believe what they are doing is illegal and you would like them to stop, and if they don't stop you may take legal action. They are basically a way to settle things without suing. Of course oftentimes they are used more as a threat than a warning ("Do what we want or we will sue you for millions of dollars") in the hopes the people would rather stop doing whatever it is they are doing than go through a court case they may or may not win (but will cost money either way).
In short, there is nothing wrong with C&D letters. They should be the first step someone takes when they find someone infringing their copyright, trademark or the like. But they shouldn't be used as a way to scare people away from legal activities, which they often are.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
With some causes of action, if a potential plaintiff continues the conduct after having been explicitly notified, and if that action is deemed illegal, the defendant can be held to have acted willfully. In most cases, willful conduct results in greatly increased damages. In just about all cases, willful conduct looks very bad to a jury.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I have no idea of how good they are as schools, do they have a political leaning, or anything like that. If I was a parent, I'd probably ask some questions too. Definitely an Edu-Corp.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Where does due process come into the picture? (Answer: it doesn't, since due process is about a person being able to protect himself against one-sided legal action.) The Constitution provides no penalties for libel, and corporations generally have as little ground as public figures do when it comes to making defamation claims. The joke has a nugget of truth in that in America, everything that is not prohibited is permitted.
You also confuse the company's claim that the posts are defamatory with that actually being the case. Since the company refused to identify -- even as an example -- any post on the site that was defamatory, I doubt even they believe they have a case that would stand up in court. They just want to scare people into compliance.
Looking at some of the comments on that site, I can see why CSUSA thinks they have a case. Most of the worst posts have now been deleted, but the parents were in there accusing teachers of all kinds of horrible crimes, as well as CSUSA of condoning them.
I read through some of that website, the worst post I saw was something about stealing pizza. I didn't see anything approaching libel.
If CSUSA takes Reigelman to court and successfully proves that the parents were falsely defaming CSUSA on that website, then it is an open and shut case of libel, which is against the law.
The proper approach would be to subpoena the forum owner for the names of the libelous parents. Then sue those parents for libel. The vast majority of the posts on this site are nowhere near libelous, so the school has no right to shut down the entire site.
This clearly sounds like it's just a threatening action designed to silence people rather than merely stopping libel. If it were about libel they'd being going after individuals, not trying to shut down the site.
AccountKiller