Internet Defamation Law and Web Critics
Dealing with Search engines Critics
Basically every firm big and little is likely to bring in at the very least a few critics after a number of years of operation, who could publish their opinions for the world to see in an attempt to disparage the organization they do certainly not like. Often the critics have legitimate criticisms, and some other occasions the remarks may possibly end up being libelous, having been printed by annoyed consumers or competing firms who want to harm the business by lying.
Whatever the case may be, online criticism of a business represents a problem for entrepreneurs. Depending on the situation, there are a few measures which often could possibly be used to combat back against critique against a small business.
Defamation Lawsuits
If the responses are bogus and detrimental, a case for defamation could very well often be made. This is normally a long process unless the identity of the commenter is known, because it involves a prolonged discovery method when trying to identify the defendant from their on the internet username.
If a defamation case is successful, it can result in an award of monetary damages for the injured party, 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, web critics may violate trademark and copyright laws designed to protect your intellectual property in the course of publishing their material; they may infringe on your trademark rights by using a domain name that incorporates your brand name.
Brand name use is not always 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.
Nonetheless, sometimes a threshold can be crossed and it can cause an inordinate amount of copyrighted works to be misused thereby removing any option of a fair use defenese. You may consider engaging in copyright litigation against them, or sending DMCA takedown notices to their host to get the content removed.
Dealing with Legal Criticism
Not every case is one where criticism will automatically give way to a cause of action for defamation.. In such a case, there are other tactics which can be used. Often, forums, online 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.
Another solution is to hire a reputation management company to protect your business name. Just think of how much a business can suffer from negative comments about it.. 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 working 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 and weigh the pros and cons of each. 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 coping with web critics, you can visit the website of The Kelly Law Firm.
Aaron M. Kelly is an Internet Lawyer in Scottsdale, AZ.
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