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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EL KABONG!!! who wrote (783)	9/17/2000 12:08:50 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Respond to of 12468

Re: More background on the RTIN suit (from personal experience) Kerry, you wrote: Mr. Worst also failed to put any of his own words in the post that would have removed himself (and his personal opinions) from the meat of the disputed words. He should have (in his own words) said something along the lines of "I copied this from blah-blah-blah and that person's opinion is as follows...". He could also have added something along the lines that the original post was copied merely for ease of discussion within the SI thread. However, he failed to do anything of the kind. While that may be true of Defendant Worst, it was not true of Defendants Davidson and "MB" (I did not investigate the others). Davidson started off with: Market Marker Implications for Alydaar --- FYI, a post from another board Message 6546048 MB was a tad more specific, beginning with: More information on Thomson Kernaghan: This was taken off the Yahoo message board under CSGI... Message 6239830 continued in Message 6239870 The original message written by "Tech" on the CSGI Yahoo thread has long since been deleted. However, some of the peripheral posts remain: messages.yahoo.com Given the tenacity in which the Plaintiff's lawyers have gone after Defendant Worst, one would think they'd have have pursued the original author, Tech, to the ends of the earth. One would be wrong. As a matter of fact, in an attempt to get a friend released from the suit, I personally told one attorney involved with the case how to contact Tech, whose phone number I had obtained privately. In retrospect, given my disdain for companies that file frivolous lawsuits, I regret doing so, but, as I considered Tech to be the most egregious tout and liar on SI (he had several dozen aliases, including the infamous Shawn Murphy, all of which SI later verified and deleted), I did what I thought was best at the time. Several months later, Kernaghan and Valentine filed a similar suit against Restaurant Teams et al in Ontario Court (98-CV-161287). For some strange reason both Davidson and MB were named again as defendants, but not Worst. Even more bizarre, Tech was not named... but Shawn Murphy was. And who did the suit say Shawn Murphy was? Me! And I got served! Naturally I called back the attorney and told him the problem. He said not to worry, that it was obviously a mistake, and he'd take care of it. A few months later Yahoo was dismissed from the case and I got notice sent to me. I was apparently still a defendant. Once again I called the attorney who then once again assured me he'd take care of it. I asked if he'd identified who Tech really was and he said "no". I asked if he'd called the number I gave him and he said yes but that the person who answered denied being Tech... so that was that! Meanwhile, a defendant told me he was promised by a law firm that contacted him that for $7K (as I recall) he would be out of the suit. Apparently this was part of some group discount they had passed on from representing other defendants. As for me, I knew enough from other lawsuits where defendants were indiscriminantly named that all the suing company wants is to make a good showing in front of its investors. Challenge them in court, i.e. say you were unfairly charged, and they'll come after you for speaking up. Ignore them, and they'll ignore you as the whole point is to make you shut up in the first place. As I had absolutely nothing to do with RTIN (i.e. I was neither an investor in them nor even read their threads), I just didn't bother to respond. I figured they'd figure me being from the US and the suit being filed in Canada there was not much they could do to me. And even had they gotten a default on me, I knew I could appeal. In no way am I giving legal advice. In fact, I know what I did was the opposite of what a lawyer would say, but, hey, at that point in time I had had my share of lawyers and lawsuits! (gg) In any event, as I've posted, the two main parties settled their differences shortly thereafter and all pending litigation was stayed (although I never did get official notice as such). Case closed... except, of course, for poor Mr. Worst. :( - Jeff