can’t sleep

I’m exhausted but can’t sleep, in the midst of my hectic long week, I received an email from some random guy requesting I remove a comment from my site. I replied back and removed the comment, then he threatened legal action unless I requested that Bing and Google remove any reference to his name in association with my accutane journal. I sent a request to Google to remove the link, they sort of did, the remove it from the main search page, but if you did further, it still shows up. I asked Bing to remove all references to the guy’s name as well, actually I asked them if they could possible remove his name in general from their hits, so he no longer existed.  The guy was constantly emailing me saying I had to do it, now of course, I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t post the comment but it actually spurred me to write a comment policy for any future potential issues with random comments. He was constantly emailling me threatening the following legal actions:

Doctor Patient Confidentiality/Defamation of Character/Misfeasance/Malfeasance/Breach of Fiduciary Duty

  • Well since my journal is just a journal and I am not a doctor and he is not my patient, then Doctor Patient Confidentiality doesn’t hold water
  • Since I did not post the comment, Defamation of Character, doesn’t hold water either. The person who used his name, maybe.
  • Misfeasance – I didn’t post the comment and I removed it as requested, I did nothing wrong
  • Malfeasance – I’m not a public official, I did nothing wrong
  • Breach of Fiduciary Duty – obligation to act in the best interest of another party, I removed the comment, I actually probably went way over and aboard but seriously I just wanted this guy out of my life. And besides that, I don’t owe this guy anything, the best interest of this particular party – I got hits on my blog, yeah!
  • Actually though after writing out all these definitions, if you’re going to act and play like some big time lawyer, you might want to make sure your legal definitions even pertain to the situation

So I decided to just delete the whole accutane journal and recreated it, that should stop all google and bing crawls and any association with this guy right? And yet, I decided to post a chit-chat question on Google’s webmaster forum referencing this guy name in full because I was just wanted all association with him gone period (little like foot in the mouth). Little did I know that once you post a chit-chat on google, it gets indexed right away and you can’t delete a chit-chat post if someone has replied to your post. Now the guy is ranked 5 on the google because he responded back to my post and then someone else responded back and used his full name.

Two wonderful web guys responded back – which explained the situation perfectly…

What I don’t see is any “problem”. OK, so your name is XYZ. It’s relatively unusual (compared to mine, say). That doesn’t give you the right to police its use across the whole internet. Who knows how many other XYZ’s there are out theere in the world? Or people who might choose that as a pen-name? Provided they’re not actively trying to pass themselves off as you, I don’t think you have a legal leg to stand on. So your name is on some random junk site. So what? Who cares? Nobody is going to look at that site and assume you typed it in yourself. In fact, nobody is going to look at that site at all. It’s irrelevant. If you’re worried about your online reputation, I’d be way more concerned about how your efforts to deal with this “problem” come across: you look like an egomaniac with way too much time on his hands. Stomping around the internet, threatening people with legal action for taking thy holy name in vain. It’s really not giving a good impression.

and the next one

Gosh, personally I wouldn’t worry about it. Since his name has been posted here, he now has a rank of 5 for this fourm! I’ll request a removal of this thread but I doubt they will do anything.

Anyways, I feel a little better. Maybe google will remove the thread from the chit-chat forum. If not, oh well, I need to get some sleep.  Me personally wouldn’t want to use a lawyer who doesn’t know definition of legal terms and stomps around the internet threatening people.

2 thoughts on “can’t sleep

  1. You made a fair point, but have you actually thought about how it may affect other people? I don’t say you are wrong, I just need to point out that there’s more than 1 side to this story.

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