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Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Jan 4th 2006 9:56am





What Was Juniper Thinking?

from the bad-ideas dept

A few weeks ago we wrote about Juniper's decision to sue some random message board posters at Light Reading for being typically, anonymously, annoying. As we pointed out at the time, this lawsuit made no sense. If Juniper was afraid that the posts were damaging its reputation, then filing the lawsuit would only drive more interest in what was being said. Without that, most people would have just assumed that it was typical message board ridiculousness and ignored the posts. It's even reached the point where Business Week is saying this is a case Juniper can't win. On the legal front, the company will have a hard time proving its case, but even if it did win, the bad publicity from this, and Juniper's newly enhanced reputation for being overly paranoid about what random message board posters are saying, are likely to damage the company's reputation far more than the original comments ever would.

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  1.  
    identicon
    Poncho, Jan 4th, 2006 @ 12:55pm

    No Subject Given

    I agree with you. I think every company comparable to Juniper such as Cisco, HP, AOL, etc get enough trash messages trough bulletins boards like this. In my opinion they now have to confront a huge problem out of nothing and possibly damaging their reputation. Whoever made the desicion of going on with this, is now in trouble.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  
    identicon
    Rikko, Jan 4th, 2006 @ 2:19pm

    Re: No Subject Given

    Agreed. Now I think Dell is about the worst thing in the consumer PC sector, but I'll give them credit that they don't remove much from their support boards.
    Seems every other post is someone berating them or their tech support for being useless or liars - and the posts are years old. The only ones I've seen removed are blatantly obscene.

    Good for them on that count, at least.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Jan 5th, 2006 @ 9:11am

    No Subject Given

    The company's PR efforts have been in a state of disarray for more than a year now. Even former insiders admit that Juniper executives just don't understand the value (and the difference) between good PR and bad PR. Looks like it may be time to clean house.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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