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Another Attempt At Using the Courts To Suppress an Online Review
gandhi_2 writes with this excerpt from the SF Chronicle:
"A San Francisco chiropractor has sued a local artist over negative reviews published on Yelp, the popular Web site that rates businesses. Christopher Norberg, 26, of San Francisco posted the first review in November 2007 after visiting Steven Biegel at the Advanced Chiropractic Center on Valencia Street. In the six-paragraph write-up, Norberg criticized Biegel's billing practices and said the chiropractor was being dishonest with insurance companies. ...The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a local nonprofit that supports free speech online, is considering helping with Norberg's defense. Matt Zimmerman, an attorney with the group, said Biegel will get far more negative publicity from filing the lawsuit than from a bad review on Yelp. He said the foundation is seeing more and more cases of people trying to use the courts because they're unhappy with postings on the Internet."
This happens all the time.
I personally got a call about a blog post I wrote about a shady SEO company. For those of you who don't know much about search engine optimization, it is very easy to see if some website is horrible from that perspective. The said company's own website wasn't even properly indexed, the *very* basic things such as having proper titles on each page were missing, etc... Well, I posted a short, intended to be humorous entry about it in my blog.
A few days later I got a call from them. They told me to remove the entry, told me they had been talking to their lawyers (and I instantly recognized the company's name as it is rather large, international law firm), named a few labels for crimes, including but not limited to defamation... I tried to ask if they could cite what specific thing I said in my blog about their site was not correct but they avoided answering to that.
Well, to be honest I got a bit scared. Thankfully, I just then happened to be on the year's largest computer festival in my country and there was a stand from EFF one floor below me. I visited there, conversed a while, got somewhat less scared and added an edit to my blog that I have been contacted by said firm in this manner but didn't remove anything. Got some nice amounts of link juice from the blogosphere but the company never returned to the subject.
As unrelated note, I soon found out how the company had even found out about my (rather small reader base, even if largely read in the local SEO scene) blog. When I googled with the company's name, my blog entry was second result even though there had been no optimizing at all for it...
Yep, this is defamation. Sucks to be him. The EFF won't get anywhere, you don't have a free speech right to defame a private party. This isn't a situation where a trademark is being used for commentary, or copyrighted material is being cited for criticism and commentary, etc. This guy criticized a private party, in writing (libel), about his professional life and insinuated he was involved in crimes of dishonesty.
I hope the verdict is big.
If you sue them, you create a lot of headlines (the streisand effect), causing much more damage to your reputation. If you win the case, nobody will care (the media is not interested in some random dude being wrong in a forum). If you lose, it's even worse.
This is the point of damages. Slashdot seems to love hyping up the Streisand effect but the more prominent and recognised it becomes, the more courts will take it into account awarding damages for these kinds of libel cases. For small businesses where the lost profits are unlikely to stretch past the $100,000 mark, they've a much higher chance of offsetting losses incurred through a court award, especially if it becomes known their good name has been restored.
It's unfortunate that the article didn't like to the "offending" post, so it's hard to say exactly what's alleged. That a chiropractor would respond harshly to criticism of practices around billing and insurance is hardly surprising though. Generally they're in a difficult spot - many chiropractors claim to cover a wide range of conditions but are only authorized to bill a narrow range of services. They need to retain patients, but can't unless they can bill all their services to insurance. As a result they have a lot of incentive to interpret the services they are authorized for very broadly. Going too far in this direction is billing fraud. The chiropractor's defense in these cases will sound a log like what's in the article - talk about disagreement about billing practices rather than dishonesty. It would be nice to have a link to the actual allegations to see what's going on in this case.
There's a difference between SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) and suing someone who has posted claims about you or your business that are patently false. And there's a point at which "opinion" becomes libel. The first thing that doctor's lawyer will ask:
Lawyer: So it was your "opinion" that my client's billing practices were criminal?
Defendant: Yes.
Lawyer: And which particular statute do you believe he was violating?
Defendant: Statute?
Lawyer: Well, if you were going to state an opinion that would be so harmful to someone's reputation, you'd have based it on some sort of research that led you to conclude that his behavior was actually criminal, right? You wouldn't just "pull it out of your ass" so to speak?
Defendant: Well...
Lawyer: Let me rephrase that. Let's say you put some faux fur in an artwork. If one of your clients falsely claimed that artwork contained the fur of baby harp seals that you had clubbed yourself, and that caused other clients to cancel future projects, would you write that off to mere "opinion"?
Defendant: No.
Lawyer: Why not?
Defendant: Because it's a lie.
Lawyer: Why can't it just be his opinion that it's harp seal fur from baby seals whose heads you brutally bashed in?
Defendant: Because it's not!
Lawyer: No further questions, your honor.
Start a happiness pandemic
The courts are likely going to be leery of awarding damages to a defendant who inflicted those damages upon himself. It's not the defendant who causes the extra damage associated with the publicity attached to a libel case, so he's not responsible for it.
It isn't self inflicted, it's a direct result of pursuing the case as should be expected. By that logic, you would never be able to get back legal expenses either.
You have to choose your chiropractor carefully. For sports-type injuries, aching backs and knees, and stiff necks, their treatments can be very effective. (And I seem to remember a credible clinical study to that effect from a few years ago.) The ones to stay away from are the ones who advise you that aligning your back can prevent cancer or who want to give your children adjustments in lieu of their childhood immunizations.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Chiropractic is just as bonkers as homeopathy and other CAMs. Yet somehow they've acquired this veneer of it being more scientific.
It isn't. What they generally keep quiet about is that at the core of their practice is the belief that all problems can be cured by re-aligning bones. Not just problems clearly relating to those bones, but all problems - asthma, for example. They keep quiet about this because it shows that actually their system is based on nonsense.
The British Chiropractic Association recently launched a ill-thought through case against Simon Singh for daring to point this out.
You rebuke the accusations with evidence.
I work for a mid-size web hosting company and due to the sheer volume of customers that we have, sometimes we get a couple of unhappy ones that end up making a public forum or blog post badmouthing the company. Our marketing team keeps an eye out for these and tries to work with the disgruntled customer to get the situation resolved and (ideally) make them a happy customer again. If you can't make them happy, then at least you've still come out ahead for trying.
In one case, we had a network outage in the middle of the night that caused about a third of our datacenter to lose outside connectivity for a little over three hours. This prompted one guy to post a video on the web of him ranting and raving for about 15 minutes about how bad our company was. He posted links to it on all the web hosting forums and a couple of his blogs so we found out about it pretty quickly. We were able to publicly debunk literally every claim he made. He said that his server was down all day when in reality he was logged into it just two hours before the outage. He said that his server had to be rebooted daily. Our records show that it was rebooted twice since he owned it. He said that the support staff was rude to him. Our notes show that he almost always demanded to speak to a supervisor whenever he called in. It went on and on. In his own blog, we offered to fix whatever he thought was wrong and give him a year of free hosting (worth several thousand dollars) if he would take the video down. He refused. By the time we threw in the towel, 90% of the comments on his own blog were of other people calling him an idiot and we gained several new customers that day who said they were impressed by our professionalism in that post.
The point here is that except in very rare circumstances, it's possible to rebuke false statements publicly and effectively if they are actually false. I see the threat of libel and defamation suits being used primarily to silence valid criticism and opinion than to "clear the name" of a supposedly aggrieved party. More often than not, the party filing the suit does have something to hide and just want to abuse the court system to harass and intimidate their critics into silence. And unfortunately, it works because libel, slander, and defamation laws trump the First Amendment.
For back-related things, too. There's no real science behind it, it's just "push hard here for noise." I'd imagine that it's about as beneficial for your back as cracking your knuckles is for your hands. As in: at best, it doesn't do any harm.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
i know a guy who used to suffer back pain. he was tall and drove a tiny car. he had to sit funny so his head wouldnt rub the ceiling liner. he was always going to the chiropractor.
then he bought a larger car in which he could sit normally.
no more chiropractor. anecdotal. posture.
always mosh clockwise
My chiropractor doesn't claim to stave off cancer, or treat arthritis. He must be in that 20-25%, I guess. I used to suffer terrible headaches, and I was much physically weaker than I should have been. After a few treatments from him, the headaches were gone (haven't seen him for about four years, now), and I seemed to be much stronger. I didn't put on any extra muscle or anything, I just had a much easier time lifting and carrying stuff than I did before. Even my doctor, who was a little annoyed when I first told him I was seeing a chiropractor, saw how much good it was doing me. He even recommends some of his patients to the chiropractor I went to, now.
Sure, there's an unfair portion of unscrupulous chiropractors out there, and their reputation probably isn't entirely undeserved. I'm just saying, my chiropractor was good at what he did, he didn't overcharge (though the back x-rays were expensive, since the AMA in Australia doesn't like Chiropractors and let you put anything they order on Medicare), and he seemed to really enjoy his job. There was one miraculous thing that surprised me at the time. This is a 'your mileage may vary' thing, of course, but don't count all chiropractors out.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll