Twitter, WordPress, Ning & GoDaddy All Sued In Mistargeted Lawsuit Over Defamation

from the someone-please-learn-section-230 dept

Last week, a lawsuit involving an allegedly defamatory Twitter message about a landlord made the news. This week, we've got another defamation suit involving another Twitter message and a condo building, but the situation here is quite different. First, if the alleged facts are true, it does sound like it could be defamation. It involves some condo owners, and who used Twitter, blogs and other websites to apparently accuse the condo board president of a variety of things including "murder, bribery, extortion, illicit payoffs, and corruption." Assuming those things are untrue, it would appear that the guy targeted by all this, Daniel Neiditch, has a decent defamation claim.

However, rather than just sue those folks responsible for the message, Neiditch's lawyers appear to have sued pretty much every company that these messages could loosely be associated with, including Twitter, WordPress, Ning, and GoDaddy. As Sam Bayard notes in the link, it appears that Neiditch's lawyers appear not to know about Section 230 of the CDA. That's a pretty big one for your lawyers to miss when filing a lawsuit like this. Ultimately, all four of those companies should have the case easily dismissed under Section 230, but it will be a waste of time and money in the meantime.

Of course, even if they were totally unaware of Section 230, basic common sense should tell you that these sites, hosting the content (or the domain, in the case of GoDaddy) should never be responsible for what was written on those sites. Going after them as a part of the lawsuit appears to be a blatant money grab, by trying to tie any company to the lawsuit, no matter how ridiculous the connection is between the actual action and the company. There really ought to be sanctions against lawyers who do such things, because it happens way too often.

Filed Under: dafamation, section 230
Companies: godaddy, ning, twitter, wordpress

Building A Viral Business Isn't About Alchemy

from the an-insult-to-hard-work dept

Adam Penenberg is a fantastic tech journalist whose work I've admired for many years. However, I simply can't figure out what made him write a huge fluff piece in Fast Company magazine that makes a number of stunningly bad claims. Mostly, the article is a love note to Marc Andreessen's Ning social network in-a-box startup that has had its ups and downs but has been able to raise a lot of money. You get the feeling that Penenberg is trying to pick up on a "trend" that can be flipped into a trendy business book. In this case, the trend is: "viral expansion loop," which Penenberg makes out to be a secretive "magic sauce" known only in Silicon Valley that will turn your startup into a huge success with investors shoving each other aside to throw money at you.

This is wrong for so many reasons, it's hard to know where to start. Rafat Ali at PaidContent goes through the piece bit by bit to trash it, while Owen Thomas at Valleywag dissects what Pennenberg got wrong about Ning. But much more important is the overall message that Pennenberg's article sends: that all you need to know is this "secret formula" and you'll build yourself "a billion dollar business."

The thing is, there's no secret -- and so far, there's been no billion dollar business based on these concepts. "Viral expansion loops" may be a new term, but it's just a repackaging of "the network effect," which has been widely known and discussed for ages. There have already been multiple books on it, so, if Penenberg thinks this is a book, he's late to the game. But, personally, what's even more dangerous to unwitting entrepreneurs is this thought that if you can create a product where each user gets new people to join, you're an automatic success that will grow forever. Penenberg promises that using such a system "almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth" and that "you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch." Yet, he gives no actual proof to support either statement.

Sure, there are companies that have grown virally -- but that's nothing new at all. And, if you look at the most successful "viral" growth stories, almost all of them kicked off with well-known, well-connected or well-funded founders. Thay've had a lot less to do with some "engineering alchemy" (as Penenberg claims) than with a group of folks who seeded the process and got it running. I've seen tons of "viral" apps out there that went nowhere. And it wasn't because they lacked that "engineering alchemy" or a "viral expansion loop." It was because building a business is difficult and takes a lot of effort, and not everyone succeeds at it. Penenberg's article is the worst kind of business fluff article: not only is it wrong, but it will get people to think that it's easy to do something that's actually very, very difficult.

Filed Under: adam penenberg, network effects, viral expansion loop, viral growth
Companies: ning