Re: 2/7/05 - USA Today: Company backlash strikes gripe sites
Posted 2/7/2005 12:50 PM Updated 2/7/2005 1:59 PM
Company backlash strikes gripe sites
By James McNair, The Cincinnati Enquirer
Quick-tempered Americans really lose it when they've been had as consumers. Increasingly, they are taking out their anger on strongly worded Internet gripe sites.
---
[picture]
Eric Wiedemer created a gripe site to complain about his troubled Suzuki. The company bought back the car, but threatened to sue him because of defamatory material on the site.
By Meggan Booker, The Cincinnati Enquirer
---
Take a look at myvwlemon.com , which boasts 2,000 members and about 15,000 message board postings from Volkswagen buyers.
Many such sites exist. But a growing number of consumers around the nation are eliciting an unexpected response from the companies they're assailing: lawsuits and legal threats. As companies find their names and logos besmirched on Web gripe sites, they unleash allegations ranging from trademark violations to defamation.
Eric Wiedemer, a 32-year-old Cincinnati auto painter, incurred corporate wrath when he created a Web gripe site last year to complain about a $20,000 Suzuki Verona car he bought from an Alabama dealer. From the day he drove it home, he said the engine stalled repeatedly. Unable to resolve the problem at a local Suzuki dealership, he hired a lawyer and created the Web site suzukiveronasucks.com.
American Suzuki Motors, which declined to be interviewed for this article, bought back the car but wouldn't pay Wiedemer's legal bill and threatened possible legal action.
"The Web site contains a significant amount of defamatory, misleading and inaccurate information regarding American Suzuki," wrote Toby Schisler of Dinsmore & Shohl in an Oct. 4 letter to Wiedemer's lawyer. "If he elects to file suit against American Suzuki, (the company) will consider filing a counterclaim to address the material contained on your client's Web site."
Wiedemer filed suit Nov. 22 seeking legal fees, now about $4,500, from Suzuki. Schisler countered that if the suit wasn't withdrawn, Suzuki would seek to recover its legal costs from Wiedemer. Four days before Christmas, Suzuki asked that the suit be dismissed.
Free speech?
Gripe sites have opened a new battlefront over the First Amendment and one's right to free speech.
The Internet makes it possible for people to air their complaints to anyone in the world with a computer, and courts are being asked to decide if they are crossing the line of fair play.
"This is a developing area of the law," said Susan Grogan Faller, who practices First Amendment law for Frost Brown Todd in Cincinnati. "It appears that the usual rules apply, certainly with respect to defamation of individuals and corporations and disparagement of products and services. If you make a false statement about a verifiable fact, that's defamation, and the First Amendment doesn't protect it."
Legal decisions
Consumers have won some Web gripe site cases, including some where the charge pertains to creating, for commercial purposes, Web sites that incorporate or emulate the names of the companies they criticize, an act called cyber-squatting.
In New Orleans, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Houston homebuyer Joseph Maxwell, who had created a gripe site about his builder. The builder won an $80,000 judgment, but it was overturned in April. The appeals court found no "bad faith intent to profit" by Maxwell.
Civil claims were dismissed against a New Jersey man who set up Web sites that shamed his moving company and a Massachusetts Web site designer whose gripe site drew a slander suit from her car dealer. In Cincinnati, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's ruling that a Michigan woman, Michelle Grosse, showed no bad-faith intent in creating a Web site chastising the work of her former landscaper.
© Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
usatoday.com |
