It's Ok to Call a Company Crappy...If You Do It Online
That’s the gist of today’s court victory for “Stillworldly,” an anonymous poster on Yahoo! Finance message boards. Public Citizen and the Electronic Frontier Foundation attorneys represented the anonymous poster.
The crappy company in question is IA Global, which operates telemarketing operations overseas in addition to other activities (it touts itself as ”a growing Business Process Outsourcing (“BPO”) and Financial Services corporation” on its Web site – yuck).
But it’s not just its slimy-looking business that makes IA Global a crappy company. It’s stock performance hasn’t exactly been stellar. In mid-2000, it’s stock was about $5 a share; since then, it’s tanked to around $0.05 a share.
Stillworldly observed this lousy performance on a public forum, and IA Global seemed to think this was grounds for a defamation suit.
But the band of merry outsourcers dropped the defamation lawsuit filed against the anonymous posters after Public Citizen and EFF’ showed how wrong they were.
In the settlement brought on by IA Global, the company agreed to pay the filing and attorney’s fees and posted on Yahoo!’s message board that it would respect posters’ First Amendment rights.
Stillworldly posted an apology too, asserting that he or she did not intend to insinuate that IA Globall’s CEO had broken any securities laws. In his posting he, wrote this well-said bit:
Anyway, free speech is a precious gift. It protects all of us when those with more money to pay lawyers than we have, try to intimidate us for speech they just don’t like.
But remember, the response to free speech you don’t like isn’t a lawsuit. It’s more free speech. Speak out against what you don’t like, and point out what you think a bad poster is saying wrong. Don’t try to intimidate people with threats and lawsuits – it’s not what our country is about, and there are strong laws to protect us little people.
Corporations may try to bully the public into silence to protect their bottom lines, but they can’t take away the public’s right to free speech (or at least not as long as they’ve got watchdogs like us to deal with).
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Large or small companies have the right to defend their reputation in court. This is especially true when disgruntled investors take their anger out on a company, due to their own lack of insight in investment expertise. Instead of dealing with their underlying issues of anger and frustration at their own inability to predict market movement they ignorantly lash out at companies and making sweeping judgement with childish phrases, such as "crappy". Then they run to mother and hide behind our constitution . I know very little about IAO Global..But good for them for standing up for their reputation Now that is a real opposing view!