Be Careful What You Subpoena. It May Turn Up More Than You'd Like People To Know

from the oops dept

Tue, Aug 19th 2008 1:06am — Mike Masnick

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

7 Comments

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Shohat, 19 Aug 2008 @ 1:43am

Ahem
IANAL.
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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Jake, 19 Aug 2008 @ 2:39am

Hah! That'll teach them not to be juvenile about a critical remark in future! I'll be laughing about this one all day.
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Aug 2008 @ 5:25am

Re: Ahem
Its one of the issues with our court system. It has to go to a magistrate/judge/jury before the stupidity of it can be decided.

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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Peter, 19 Aug 2008 @ 6:29am

You get what you deserve
Talk about opening pandora's box.
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JB, 19 Aug 2008 @ 7:08am

Imposed Anonymity
It's interesting the lengths to which they have gone to keep users anonymous even to the site owners. The user does not have an email address - which also means no ability to recover from a lost password. No information is saved from the user's membership application. No email address, no IP address. Payment information is not saved, so there no tie back to credit card information.

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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Benjamin Wright, 19 Aug 2008 @ 7:25am

e-discovery subpoenas
The legal idea of a subpoena has been around for a long time. And one might be surprised how easy it is to get a subpoena. But with the advent of e-discovery, old-fashioned subpoenas can today trigger a volcanic eruption of data disclosure. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2007/09/endless-investigations.html
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Derek Kerton (profile), 19 Aug 2008 @ 7:33am

Crazy
This is crazy. It's just an anon comment on a freaking website! Why get out the big legal guns, Streisand it up, and act like a Diva?

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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