Internet Defamation Law and Web Critics
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by: AaronKlunizka
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Coping with Cyberspace Critics
Most every business organisation important and little will probably pull in at the very least a small amount of critics after a few years of operation, whom will distribute their feedback for the globe to discover in an effort to disparage the business they do not really like. Often the critics possess legit criticisms, and some other occasions the feedback may be libelous, having already been circulated by annoyed clients or rivals who want to harm the business by lying.
Whatever the case may be, on the web criticism of a business represents a problem for entrepreneurs. Depending on the scenario, there are a number of steps which may well be obtained to combat back against criticism against a company.
Defamation Lawsuits
When the feedback are generally bogus and detrimental, a case for defamation might possibly be made. This is generally a long process unless the identity of the commenter is known, because it involves a lengthy discovery procedure when trying to identify the defendant from their on-line username.
If a defamation case is successful, it can result in an award of monetary damages for the complaintant, as well as an injunction against the defendant requiring them to remove the defamatory content that they have published.
Trademark/Copyright Lawsuits
In certain cases, criticism can be dealt with via the mechanisms provided by the copyright statutes. they may infringe on your trademark rights by using a domain name that incorporates your brand name.
Of course, not all brand name use is useful.... For example, PayPalSucks.com, a website which posts complaints about PayPal's services, is legal because there is no chance that it would be confusingly similar to anything PayPal owns, since the name clearly indicates a disparagement of their product.
However, if someone registered, "PayPalPaymentSolutions.com" in order to entice people to arrive at a site which disparages the product, a case could be made that the domain name's use of the PayPal trademark could confuse patrons and infringe on PayPal's intellectual property rights.
Likewise, a critical website may post an excessive amount of intellectual property that your business owns that goes beyond the fair use exemption. You may consider engaging in copyright litigation against them, or sending DMCA takedown notices to their host to get the content eliminated.
Coping with Legal Criticism
Criticism doesn't always rise to the level of defamation.. In such a case, there are other tactics which can be used. Often, forums, on line newspapers, and other websites which accept user submissions will have a Code of Conduct for their users which requires a higher standard to be met than simply not defaming someone. It may be worth sending them a letter complaining about an user's abusive comments, and letting the website decide whether they want to be the forum for that person's content. Sometimes, this may achieve good results, with the user's criticism being removed and not requiring litigation.
You may also want to hire a reputation clearing and monitoring company to help you with your image. If the critical comment is showing up somewhere in the first pages of Google, it can be a major revenue buster for a business which relies on getting clients through search engines. Reputation management companies can work to take the step mentioned above about reporting the user, but they can also optimize certain keywords so that pages favorable to your business crowd out the bad content on the first pages of search engine results.
ICANN even has a policy in place for dealing with domain name infringment.
Things to Consider
Not every strategy is the best approach for dealing with disparaging comments about your business. A few things should be taken into consideration when deciding what the best approach is to take:
. Cost.It can be expensive to engage in litigation, so think twice before jumping in head first. You should consider the cost versus the benefits (is there a good chance of winning, if you do win will it stop a major source of criticism, will you be able to collect if you win or is the defendant indigent , etc). If the cost is too high, you may want to consider cheaper alternatives like reputation management or sending a letter to the website which hosts the material if it violates their Terms of Service.
. Will you create further problems for yourself? If you commence litigation against a web-savvy person, you might just turn what was a relatively minor complaint into a cause c?l?bre of Internet dwellers. A publicity campaign may be waged against you by web users who are offended by your litigiousness and end up making you even worse off. A recent lack of understanding about copyright law by an editor of Cooks Source Magazine resulted in such a large Internet-based backlash that the magazine decided to shut down its operations.
. Long-term strategy. If web criticism is more than a minor event, it may be worth hiring a reputation management company to monitor criticism and take action against it on an ongoing basis.
Hopefully this has been an useful overview of how to deal with web critics, but it is just that: an overview. For a more extensive evaluation of how to deal with web critics, you should consider consulting legal counsel and/or a reputation management company. For more information about working with web critics, you can visit the website of The Kelly Law Firm.
About the Author
Aaron M. Kelly is an Internet Lawyer in Scottsdale, AZ.
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