Can You Complain About A Company?

from the no-free-speech-for-you! dept

It seems that a few of these legal cases show up a year, and it's about time the issues were more clearly laid out. Someone who felt they were ripped off by a company, set up a website bashing that company. In response, the company sued, claiming trademark violation and defamation. There are all sorts of issues raised by this. Is it really defamation to complain about bad treatment you received? Is there really a violation of trademark? Trademark is used to avoid having people be confused. Anyone finding this particular website is unlikely to think that the creator was the company in question, since the whole website talks about how bad the product (some kind of "spray on house siding") really is. Another issue, is that the website had a message board, and the company is upset with some of the comments. However, other lawsuits have shown that if you set up a message board, the owner of the site is not responsible for what people say on the message board, since they're just a "service provider." Of course, all this case really accomplishes for the company is getting more attention on them for making someone so unhappy that they went to these lengths to let the world know. Perhaps they would have just been better off fixing the problems and making the customer happy?

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