Way back in 1994, deep in the basement studios of WNTE at Mansfield University, I was introduced to a spiffy little program known as Cello. Long before Firefox, Internet Explorer, and even Netscape, Cello allowed that 486SX/25 PC running Windows 3.1 to surf something known as “the world wide web”. Now this was not my first introduction to the Internet; I had been using Gopher and Telnet for years. But once I saw what Cello (or, more specifically, the web as we know it today) was capable of, I thought it: “This is gonna be huge.”
Knowing that the basic underpinning theory on which all Internet applications are built is “instant communication”, it wasn’t long until people started using the net to share opinions on anything and everything. A natural extension was to share opinions of companies with terrible customer service or ridiculous policies.
About two years ago, blogger Smith posted about his negative experiences with eBay listing company Bidzirk. The details of his complaint are lengthy, but in short, he doesn’t recommend them. The funny thing about our modern litigious society is that companies generally react very poorly to negative public commentary. In this particular case, not only did Bidzirk sue the blogger for defamation, privacy invasion, and trademark infringement (apparently because he used the name “Bidzirk” in his review; try coming after ME, guys), but the plantiff’s attorney actually placed a lis pendens against the blogger’s condo. In English, this essentially means that Bidzirk assumed they would win, and they took preemptive steps to secure the condo as damage (perhaps one of our local attorneys can post a more thorough explanation in the comments).Â
The case was ultimately thrown out for numerous reasons. In fact, the court reprimanded Bidzirk’s lawyer over the lis pendens and the nature of the case in general. Perhaps the most interesting and most significant to other bloggers is that this helps solidify precedent for future claims. The issue of whether bloggers are entitled to the same protections afforded journalists is cloudy at best. What this does is establish that even if bloggers are NOT afforded those protections, we still have a legally protected right to express our views and opinions.
Unless you’re an idiot, you can’t be sued for voicing a negative opinion against a person or business (there are exceptions to this that are beyond the scope of this blog; hence the “unless you’re an idiot). While it’s true that a jaded business could still cause legal difficulties over a critical posting, cases like this help further strengthen the defense of reasonable criticism.
