Consumer Law

Developments about Adaptive Marketing's suit to identify critical blogger

By Paul Levy

Yesterday I posted about a disturbing lawsuit seeking to identify an anonymous Internet blogger, Flaneur de Fraude, because she criticized Adaptive Marketing for what Flaneur and Reuters blogger Felix Salmon called a ?predatory bait and switch.?  Two interesting factoids emerged from discussion of this case in the blogosphere.

Felix Salmon, whose blog post about the Ben Stein TV commercial began this whole brouhaha, points out that Adaptive has never been in touch with him (or with Flaneur for that matter) to complain about the content of the discussions of its business or to ask for any corrections.   Now, there is no legal obligation to ask for a correction, of course, but generally speaking, a polite letter to someone who has made a false statement, pointing out what the truth is, tends to be a lot cheaper than hiring counsel and seeking discovery, not to speak of litigating a defamation suit.  If there is a serious defamation issue, it is also a lot cheaper for the blogger to fix the problem than to litigate ? even with pro bono counsel (which Flaneur did not have at that point).  So what does it say about Adaptive?s agenda here that it did not even try that?

And Gary Weiss points out a delicious irony of the fact that the discovery proceeding was directed at Yahoo!: Ben Stein blogs for Yahoo! Finance.

The September 21 hearing has been postponed to permit Adaptive to file a written response to our brief.  The new hearing is October 13 in Superior Court in Stamford.  Stay tuned.

Full post as published by CL&P Blog on September 18, 2009 (boomark / email).