Mom Makes Website, Gets Sued for $2 Million

An anonymous reader writes "A Canadian stay-at-home mom of 3 recently created a website to report on environmental problems around her neighborhood. The general public and governmental workers lauded her for her efforts. The environmental Ministry spokesman was even quoted as saying 'Obviously we can't have staff everywhere all the time, so we depend on the public out there as surrogate eyes and ears for the ministry'. However, not everyone was quite as happy, as she soon found out, when one company decided to sue her for libel to the tune of $2 million."

Comments

Counter sue on financial grounds

[theolein]

The lady should counter sue the company for attempting to drive her into bankruptcy. She should sue for percentually as much, based on the company's income, as the company is suing her, i.e. if her yearly income is $60'000 and she get's sued for $2million, then if the company's yearly income is $10million then she should sue for $400million. She should plainly state that she is counter suing because the company is maliciously attempting to drive her into bankruptcy with an amount that she could never pay instead of just suing to get her to close down the website.

She might not win, but it would provide precedence for annyone who is harrassed by giant companies in the future. (Hallo RIAA, did you hear that?) IT sure would be good to see some of those corporations think twice before abusing their power in future.

Re:I thought...

[rtb61]

Actually all the company has to do is extend the court case beyond the ladies ability to financially sustain the fight in court and she looses. How ever via the internet the amount of damage the company suffers in the interim and the ability of the lady to access aditional financing and information has grown exponentially, so that she can continue the fight and counter sue i.e. in making the claim of libel against her they are committing a possible act of libel and are subject to counter suit, they are impugning her character in that she would make malicous and libelous statements.

Knowing builders and developers like I do, I can say with out fear of contradiction that they all infringe to some extent in some fashion or othe,r some of the enviromental or safety laws. She just has to prove this, it will be pretty easy to do if all she will need is a little bit of support from knowledgeable people from the industry i.e. competitors, subcontractors with an axe to grind, ex-employees, disgruntled customers etc. (I think they needed their collective heads read for starting something that is pretty well gauranteed to blow up in their collective faces).