Piano World Home Page Forums General Discussions Legal Issues Please Be Careful What You Post!

It may be best to ban dealers from Piano World if they cannot refrain suing the site when they are criticized. The dealer's advice on Piano World does not seem particularly useful in most cases.

One of my favorite comedy websites gets "sued" quite often by people who try to use legal threats as intimidation. They usually respond with silly emails or ignore it completely. So far it seems to be working quite well for them. Although... that's a pretty risky approach if you're not absolutely sure of your rights in the matter.

It's utterly ridiculous to think of not being able to criticize a company for its poor products and/or services.

I copy our attorny on every threat, and let him decide the best course of action.
Often it's just a matter of me sending a knock it off or we will counter-sue email.
However, I prefer to be covered just in case.

And I will call on our 40,000+ members to help us if I have to.

Hi Frank,

I'm new here, and I had no idea you were having legal problems in the forums. I shouldn't be surprised, considering the desperate times dealers have been having selling pianos. Desperate people do desperate things.

What have you decided to do? I skipped a few pages to get to the latest bits so please forgive me if I make you repeat yourself.

And as an aside, that attorney who sent you a cease & desist letter via email was just fishing and trying to bully you, or was just a moron. You can't serve legal documents via email. It's too easy for the recipient to claim they did not get it, or read it. Every attorney knows that, unless they're stupid. They have to build up a paper trail in order to show cause at the preliminary hearing. If they can't prove that you were properly served, there's no basis to sue and the judge will throw it out. The complainant also has to show they made a good faith effort to contact you and performed due diligence to settle the matter outside of court, according to the legal definitions of those things in your home state, not the complainant's. Or there's no suit. If you actually get to court on something so flimsy, your attorney can make a motion to countersue for damages and court costs right then at the preliminary hearing. At least, you can in California! Ask you lawyer about the maneuver before you try it it in your state, though.

One thing you can do about that attorney is to contact his local State Bar office and ask if he is a member in good standing. A lawyer can be sanctioned and even disbarred by their local if they abuse courts just to bully people. I think if you called his local office and told them he sent you a cease & desist via email, they'd all have a good laugh.

No, I'm not an attorney and (caveat) I am not giving you legal advice as I'm not licensed to. But my day job has brought me to court many times, and I have had to sue a few people to get them to pay me like they said they would. So this is just my experience talking as a lay businessman.

People sue YouTube every day. Almost nobody wins.

All the Best,

Good luck to you with this thing. It makes me glad that I am retired from the wars.