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."

Comments

Chiropractors are quacks anyway

[trolltalk.com]

I'd trust a veterinarian to treat me before I'd trust one of those fraud artists.

Re:Chiropractors are quacks anyway

[gbulmash]

Quacks or not, the issue isn't with criticism of the chiro's services, but with his billing rates and practices.

But quackery is relevant here, because the doctor should have used a PR person to help him rebut the detractor's claims and used the threat of libel to make Yelp append the rebuttal directly to the criticism so they had to be viewed together. It would have been less costly all around. Better to defuse your detractor as a crackpot/quack than to sue him and give him legitimacy.

Is the doctor within his rights? If the claims made by Norberg actually are false, then he is. Was this the best way to handle things? Nope.

EFF is nice to have around

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:EFF is nice to have around

[PhreakOfTime]

Its amazing how often this kind of thing happens, and I think the only reasonable response to this kind of behavior is to PUBLISH it.

I did some contract work for a company once, and during the course of the work, found out that there were quite a few court cases against them in my local county. I decided to stop any further business dealings with them.

After not being paid for services rendered, I posted a link to our local county courthouse showing all the court cases they were currently involved in.

About 9 months later, I got a letter in the mail from an attorney, claiming all sorts of things like you described; libel, copyright, and CRIMINAL violations. The letter however was addressed to someone else in the phonebook of my small town who had the same last name as myself. I only received it after it had been sent back to the post office numerous times for an incorrect address. It should be pointed out here, that at no point was I trying to hide my identity or make it confusing as to exactly who was posting this court information. At this point it became obvious the level of professionalism I was dealing with that wouldnt even do the most basic fact checking on their accusations. The wording of this letter seemingly bordered on blackmail. To make a long story short, I posted the threatening letter for everyone to read, and havent heard another peep since.

The company who did this was the small real estate company, Caton Commercial. You can also read the Cease and Desist Letter they sent.

It honestly amazes me that a business would send such a spurious letter to someone who is already publishing the questionable ethical practices of said company. And yes, now when you search their company name, Caton Commercial in a search engine, the second result is the courthouse website listing their cases, and the third is a copy of that letter. I cant imagine that was the intended result they were after, when they first had the idea to intimidate someone for publishing already public court information.

Long history

[binkless]

Chiropractors have had many detractors over the years and have a long history of using political manipulation and legal intimidation in response. They pursue a variety of goals including suppression of criticism of their questionable practices and mandating insurance coverage for chiropractic "care." They have generally been successful. That they try to suppress online criticism is a predictable continuation of longstanding behavior

Re:Long history

[SirLurksAlot]

I'm not going to argue with you one way or the other regarding chiropractors and their methods as I don't have any experience or knowledge of them specifically. I will say however that I think you're missing the point. The issue at hand, alleged libel in a public forum, can be applied to just about any business. It just happens to be a chiropractor in this case.

Re:Long history

[Eil]

So what else can you do, really? Must be something that doesn't cause negative publicity. You might try adding a positive review to the forum under a pseudonym. But if anyone finds out about this, you have caused even more harm to your reputation.

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.

Review or Libel?

[abigsmurf]

There's a big danger in simplifying the issues here. It doesn't seem here that he's suing because it's a bad review, he's suing because he's essentially accusing him of fraud.

If he has proof to back that up, fair enough but to accuse someone of illegal practices like that when you've no proof is libel. It doesn't matter if it's done on a community site or not.

If I was running a business and a disgruntled customer posted a lie about me ("all of his PCs are built in his basement by chained up mexicans!") I would want to have some legal recourse. These kinds of lies can destroy a business, especially those on a site people are likely to visit for information on a business.