A recent phenomenon in the USA has been the proliferation of law firms and other more shadowy organizations who specialize in forms of legal bullying based on the interpretation of copyright, defamation and libel law.
The stories fall into a general pattern. An internet user, often a blogger, writes a story about a subject or an experience with a person, corporation, professional or a tradesman, or downloads a file from some internet location. Within a short period of time, said person finds themselves subjected to a threatening-sounding letter from a law firm somewhere. The letter usually makes expansive claims of copyright infringement or defamation and libel, often so vague as to be difficult to even decipher. Invariably the letter demands that the recipient remove all traces of the story immediately, pay a sum of money etc. or else...and proceeds to create an image of punitive, unrelenting legal action about to crash down on the person's head. One can imagine a man in a Cockney accent muttering "nice little website you got there, be a real shame if something woz to happen to it..."
A significant amount of the legal noise being created by lawyers is based on publications on parody sites. As a number of court cases in the past have shown, parody sites enjoy a large measure of First Amendment protection. In additionh, the people or organizations being parodied usually meet the definition of "public figures", which raises the bar still further with respect to proving not only falsehood but also malice. However, that reality does not stop public figures suffering from Butthurt from attempting to use the law as a bludgeon to frighten parodists.
However, underlying reality is that defending a website or a blog posting or comment against a punitive barrage of threatened litigation is extremely expensive. The lawyers doing the threatening are using that reality as a cudgel to force the recipients of their threats to capitulate and remove their writings from public view. This is about the most obvious form of bullying imaginable.
Fortunately, an increasing percentage of story-tellers targeted in this way are, despite being frightened and scared by the barrage of portentious-sounding messages on headed notepaper, becoming more willing to resist the intimidation.
Ken White of Popehat, a certified First Amendment Badass lawyer if ever there was one, has developed what he terms The Popehat Signal (see example here) to try and rally help for bloggers and website storytellers threatened in this way.
The gold standard for copyright deception and legal thuggery is currently held by Prenda Law, an organization that is currently having to defend itself from angry judges and courts in several legal jurisdictions against allegations of deceit, chicanery and other malfeasance in the pursuit of copyright violation allegations. The story is too long and detailed to be discussed here, but this is a good summary of recent events, which should provide insight into how deep the pile of doo-doo is for that law firm right now.
Before Prenda Law began its activities in this area, the gold standard for copyright deception was held by a company named RightHaven, which aggressively attempted to enforce copyrights on newspaper articles, until it slowly became clear that it had no valid legal ownership of custodianship of those copyrights. After that revelation, the whole RightHaven business slowly unraveled until RightHaven was closed down via bankruptcy and asset seizure. It appears that Prenda Law either did not understand the history of RightHaven, or, like most people suffering from hubris, merely assumed that Bad Stuff is something that only happens to The Other Guy.
All manner of people who have suffered real or imagined butthurt are climbing aboard the defamation/copyright infringement bandwagon on a broader front, including medical professionals (and also including a fair number of quacks) who have suffered the appearance of bad reviews on online sites such as Yelp. Quite how these busy people think that expending energy on increasing the likelihood that people will see bad reviews of their services is a sound business tactic is a question that only they can answer.However, disappearing if things don't work out is always a valid option.
As this case makes clear, suing over a bad online review is not likely to yield a positive outcome, unless you are really keen to spend lots of money on lawyers, get your name all over the internet as a censorious nitwit, and get a lot more page views for your negative online reviews.
Ken has a simple rule that can be applied to many of the initial threatening letters - namely, that vagueness in legal threats is the hallmark of thuggery. Many of those initial letters from the lawyers make claims that are ludicrously over-broad, invalid or unsupportable by evidence. In short, the claims are ridiculous.
This makes ridicule an acceptable and effective form of response. Here is an example of the artful deployment of ridicule in a Pro Bono response by a law firm to a letter threatening action over a discussion of bank routing numbers. As the letter makes clear, in between a well-deserved ridiculing of the original letter, routing numbers are not copyrightable in any case, and Greg Thatcher's discussion certainly falls within the bounds of fair use.
UPDATE - As you can probably guess from reading the links, Ken's website does an excellent job of tracking some of the more egregious attempts by bullies to frighten and intimidate People Who Are Guilty Of Causing Them Butthurt.