Hi all,
In the past, there has been some discussion about the KISS trust company on this forum. Various opinions were expressed, including one where a senior member of the group wrote "This scam product has been discussed here before. Stay away. It's a marketing ploy."
That discussion happened to make it to the first page of Google, and someone from the KISS trust company noticed. They did some snooping, dug up my family's street address (which I deliberately do not make public on this blog) and their law firm sent us a slew of registered mails.
Inside the mail was a legal threat insisting that I take the post down because of it allegedly being untrue and libelious.
I forwarded their complaint to a lawyer friend of mine, and he is looking into it in more detail to make sure we are within our rights to leave the post up.
An update on this: It is absolutely within my right to leave that post up. The well established "Section 230" rules explicitly let website owners off the hook for things their users say (as long as they are not intellectual property violations):
https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230It appears to me that the KISS trust company has a practice of Googling itself and trying to censor content and discussions that it feels are "libelous". And this definition even includes some random person expressing the opinion that the company is a scam.
And since their law firm would obviously be aware of that section 230 limitation, it also appears they sent me that threat to intimidate me, even knowing quite well that I could not be held responsible for the user's post.
I'll leave it up to the readers to decide if this is a good business practice. If not, you might want to spread the word of this incident, so others can be warned about the company's business tactics. Just be careful, because the next registered mail might be in YOUR mailbox!
If I hear from them again, I may have to make a top-level MMM article to document what has happened, because shit like this really should not be happening and the world needs to be warned about companies that attempt it.
You don't "protect your company reputation" by gagging others who speak out against it. You protect it by doing good work and making sure that your OWN website displays accurate facts.
Any further legal help would be welcome, since it would be nice to work against this from both ends of the table.
Another update: they DID continue the harassment, by sending me a second complaint about THIS thread. Fuck that. Here's the main-blog article as promised:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/03/11/mmm-receives-legal-threats-great-lawyer-wanted/This is not intended to harm the company's business - simply to report what they are doing, so they will stop doing it. If KISS issues an apology and a promise to NEVER harass any website owner again over similar complaints, I'll gladly publish their retraction and all will be well.
If they continue to raise the threat level, this story just might become interesting enough to get picked up in the Washington Post! We can hope, anyway.
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