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Software Company Sues Popular Australian Forum
Pugzly writes "In a recent announcement on the Whirlpool front page, it appears that accounting software maker 2clix is suing the founder of the forums as the founder "allowed statements 'relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious' to be published on the Whirlpool forums."
Owners of forums are explicitly exempt from libel prosecution.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Links to the threads in question:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=628356
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=479484
Australian Defamation Laws are ridiculously powerful.
A failed restaurant recently successfully sued a major newspaper for a negative review in the Australian High Court.
One of the many flaws in 2Clix is that you get an unhandled division by zero exception when reprinting payslips if a certain non-mandatory field is zero or empty. Now, surely division by zero is the most basic and fundamental example of error handling used in any programming course or book or tutorial or other. To my mind, 2Clix are receiving negative criticisms for having software which is poorly-written and unreliable in its behaviour and outputs. To then attempt to silence critics by demanding censorship of unpalatable comments is nothing short of arrogant, bullying and reprehensible. I can barely imagine 2Clix or its lawyer considered how massive and widespread the publicity would become! People worldwide now know of this tiny accounting software package - and not for good reasons. Whirlpool.net.au is a well-respected forum, frequented by many IT professionals and decision-makers. I think 2Clix will find that Simon Wright has far more credibility and supporters than they do.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
- Firstly, whirlpool are THE resource for finding out about ISPs in Australia. Their neutrality and open forums, should they be lost, would be very, very bad for consumers.
- Secondly, a ruling against whirlpool means a precedent would be set which basically ensured that forums in Australia would be practically eliminated. This is both bad for a lot of businesses and bad for users.
For these reasons I really really hope that whirlpool wins (well, for those reasons and the obvious moral reasons).As was mentioned earlier Australia has some of the toughest defamation laws in the world. We have many things to be proud of in this country but legal protection of freedom of speech is not one of them.
"most people on whirlpool, are IT managers and admins"
Oh please. Whilst I'm sure there are a lot of IT Managers and sysadmins on Whirlpool (I'm one of them), they're vastly outnumbered by kids and "enthusiast" internet users who's prime purpose on Whirlpool is to shop around for the most speed and monthly download capacity for their (parents) dollar.
2clix were hassling me a while back with cold-calls trying to get me to buy their software. When asked what their software was/did, they described it in pure marketing terms - telling me all the positive effects they supposed it would have on the business, instead of what it's actually used for and what roles it fills. I got their URL so I could look into it when I had time... the use of obnoxious stock photos on every page (see http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos) and the anonymous quote "Quite Simply The Best" turned me off from the start. Our brief business relationship ended before it began with me telling 'em to take me off the call list. After getting off the phone with their rep, I felt like I needed a shower... reading this news about 'em isn't really surprising at all.