Be Careful What You Subpoena. It May Turn Up More Than You'd Like People To Know
from the oops dept
Remember the VC firm, EDF Ventures, which brought a lot more attention to a negative review on the website TheFunded.com by sending a subpoena to find out who wrote the negative review? Well, it turns out the decision keeps getting worse and worse. VentureBeat has the details that were turned up by the subpoena -- and the result is more details of the criticism, but no identifying information of the poster. Since TheFunded allows parts of comments to be public, with other parts designated as "members only," the subpoena has now made the "members only" content public, and it trashes the deal terms offered by the firm and criticizes a partner who has no operating experience. Also, the details suggest that this wasn't a spurned entrepreneur, but an adviser or partner in some manner. Either way, beyond drawing more attention to a negative review, now the firm has made public even more critical info.
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Filed Under: criticism, streisand effect, venture capital
Companies: edf ventures, thefunded
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Ahem
Why do they even have the right to do this ? Someone leaves normal, reasonably worded criticism.
Is there anything offensive/illegal in what he did ?
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Re: Ahem
If there were harsher penalties for frivolous lawsuits it might help. Chances are it would just get abused like everything else though.
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You get what you deserve
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Imposed Anonymity
The one potential stumbling block - the date and time of the post are saved, which could be tied back to generic server logs which contain the user's IP address. Although I'd have to guess those logs are not saved.
A refreshing change from sites such as Google, Amazon, or eBay which track and record every move made by the user and tie it back to personally identifiable information.
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e-discovery subpoenas
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Crazy
A better solution would be to lobby TheFunded to add a "feature" that would allow the VC firm a short rebuttal to reviews.
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