We've had a few posts that have sailed very close to the wind in terms of libel here recently. There are two major forms of defamation in Australia:

- libel, where the record is permanent and written
- slander, where the record is non-permanent, and may be verbal

Libel is the main issue for us as we could be considered "permanent" and the basic premise of defamation is "to injure the personal, professional, trade or business reputation of an individual or a company, to expose them to ridicule or to cause people to avoid them". Obviously, as we don't make a habit of deleting posts, it's permanent, and there's a wide audience which can cause a business real harm if an accusation is made. The truth is not a defense in Australia - it is a consideration when awarding damages (if any) but by then, this place would be shut down.

The above is obviously all about CYA, which is unfortunately necessary. But we as a VW community should hang together and we shouldn't put up with shonky businesses, but for Jim and Brad (and potentially any of the admins / moderators like me or Chris or Anthony or Jay) we have to protect our collective arses.

So what I propose is this:

- Rule 0: if you have something potentially defamatory you want to post, think on it for 24 hours before you send one of the admins (there are several of us) an e-mail. Do not post it straight up or the post will be deleted. But...

- An e-mail address that you can write to with a specific compliant about a business. You cannot make allegations willy nilly, and all allegations must be within the bounds of the Trade Practices Act (cwth) and your state's Sale of Goods Act or similar. We will not act on innendo or irrelavancies ie "the mechanic looked at me funny" or "he didn't wash my car" or similar.

- If we see that your statements are supportable, we might ask for further proof before the next step.

- We take it up on your behalf and give a right of reply from the business involved.

- We will try to get the two of you to resolve your differences amicably before any potential decision to publish

- Once we have both halves of the story, we either decide to publish both the problem and the response (and the resolution, if any), or we sit on it if we think it might sale too close to the legal wind for our collective arses.

- This board is run as a volunteer service, and in Brad's case, costs him actual money. Therefore please understand when I say I reckon we will not be able to take up each compliant as we simply don't have time and for similar reasons we will not be publishing all responses.

What do you think? Remember, if you like a business, you can indicate that by adding it to the Business Directory. This poll is about the negative example, and is about specific instances of bad customer service or other specific allegations of poor trading.

Poll close date: 1 March 2003. Please discuss until then. Until I get some feedback from Brad and Jim, the poll's result will not be official.

Andrew

Andrew,

Like yourself I can get very busy, but I would be willing to help out with this.

:thumb

i am confused - go over to STF any time and in the home of litigation (USA) there are threads relating

* GEX is crap
* Performance Technology do crap work
* Engle cams go flat before they are run in
* Bernie Berg is crap

now especially with the GEx go and read it now on the Engine Building forum. As a few ( like 2 people) say everyone dumping on GEX it always starts with "my ex-girl friends cousin bought ......."
Very few have put up hard facts......go and read it!

Now why arent these guys sued?
Arent we getting a bit parinoid?

Just my $1,000.00 worth

I have stated my opinion before but hey:

I reckon if it is factual and first hand post away but leave out the attitude. The world has a right to know and no one should be protected.

NOTE I said if it happens to you and your post is fcts and not opinion.

From what I've seen discussed so far, I'd say go for it. :thumb

You will not get sued if you can prove your comments.
Quote from a barrister!

so why mess about with all the crap about getting people together to sort out the problem
Dont you think that if some one is upset enough to post , that they might have contacted the offending person first.

It goes back to the fact that you should be able to post what you want,,,, we dont need to have our posts vetted just incase it might upset one out of 500 members

Cheers
Dave

Andrew,

For the record i HAVE waited 24 hours before replying to this.

I'll start with a short story where I bought some computer goods that simply didn't do the job they were supposed to - so I returned them and politly explained that I would like a refund.
The owner of the shop said "If you dont like it f*ck off and take it to consumer affairs".(Apols if the quote offends).
Now I dealt with it in my own charming way and when I left the shop I had my money back.

The point of this is that if any of you have tried taking anything to consumer affairs you will know that it is a loooong and tiresome process - most people will give up after the first 6 months.

This proposal will give people a larger voice and help them get a fair deal, if managed in a responsible manner, which will take time (and Andrew has offered that time).

In short, what do you two guys prefer to do if you feel you have been ripped off.

1. Whinge and cry like baby how its just not fair and the world should be a better place and you should be able to say what you want....
2. Have it sorted out so you get a proper result - like a refund or a partial refund or maybe even get the work done again.


As an afterthought it's very easy to be blasé about the risk of being sued when its not your house/job whatever on the line.
Lets say one of you lot log on and make lots of bad remarks about my business. I have no idea of who 57kombi (sorry to pick on you) actually is, proving who it is would be even more difficult.
However a "whois" search (just done one) shows that the owner of aussieveedubbers.com is someone here called Jim Gow (Hi Jim).
Searching the forum shows that his username is bennetonvw - I now have a body I can hit with a lawsuit.

But Jim dont panic blue74l has the perfect defence to stop you losing everything you posess. Just tel the Judge "No its fine they do it in the States all the time."
I'm sure he will then dismiss the case imeadiately.

Now I'll take my tongue out of my cheek and ask that we all grow up a bit and actually learn to live in the world we live in rather than complain that it should be different.

BTW Andrew I put I lot of thought into a post I did under something like "Hes gonna rip you off" - Brad locked the post out because of the orignal message I replied to - but if you can get acces to it it may give you some ideas.

Hmm am i missing something...............

i am NOT saying slander away coz they do it...... i am saying that there must be hundreds of chat places like this one. I chat regularly on STF and SBO and watch German Look and CLF.

What i am saying is none of those guys have any rules and regulations (well GL does but it doesnt relate to this one ) and some of the things said there are FAR worse than any dumping i have read here. I am also saying that i would have thought that IF a law suit was going to come out of all this it would have come out of the States.

I just dont want to see any one make a rod for there back. Thats all.
Hey... make all the rules you want.... i will abide or go else where.
No problem.....be happy. I was just chucking in a gold coin. Thought i might help some one from worring.

I have very little legal knowledge, but I have question. Where is the website located on what server? is it an Australian server or from another point in the world? Also does a web address actual have a physical location and what implications the answers to these two questions have when it comes to litagation?I remeber reading an article in the newspaper about this but can't remember the actual result. What iam thinking is, if its an overseas server, would the litagation have to go through the court system in that country?

I think some people might be missing the point,
This is a forum,,, where like minded peolpe interact with each other,

If I visted my local club meeting and told the other people in the club that I had my car serviced at fred Bloggs VW service center and he didnt replace the oil after he had emptied it and my engine siezed 5 kms from the work shop, I would be telling the truth cannot get sued and I would be helping the other people in the club by letting them know what type of work fred bloggs did.
I dont beleive fred bloggs should have the right to stop me telling other people, that is what is being proposed here .

If you tell the truth on the site you CANNOT get sued.
There is no better defense than the truth.

Has enyone heard of a site being sued.

What is wrong with people being advised not to visit a dodgy dealer/repair place, I thought that was what the forum was about to help each other.

I know I have gone on a bit but freedom of speach is a right and should not be messed with.

Cheers
Dave
:jesus

"A number of defences to defamation exist. These include:

* justification/truth of the imputation: the imputation is true or substantially true. In some Australian states the true or substantially true imputation must also be a matter of public interest or published for public benefit;

* absolute privilege: if material was said in court or Parliament. This defence is not available if the same statement was made outside of court or Parliament.

* qualified privilege (fair and accurate reporting of court and parliament allowed): this permits the media to publish a report of statements made in court or in parliament provided the statements made in court or in Parliament are fairly and accurately reported;

* requirement to divulge and to know communications (for example, character references or reports to authorities);

* certain publications are given statutory protection (i.e. an Act permits the publication to be made and the publisher not to be liable, eg reports to authorities);

* political debate and discussion: the reasonable publication of matters of political and governmental debate and discussion;

* fair comment; and

* consent.

Defamation with malice will defeat all defences other than truth of the defamatory material."

Quoted from: www.oznetlaw.net/home.asp?action=results&ContentID=41

Thank you Bus914
As I was not condoning defamation with malice,
As I have said, if you can prove what you say is true you cannot be sued.
And that is a fact.

Please let me know if you can prove that a web site has been sued by people posting on the forum.

I will then eat my hat.

cheers
DAve

I spoke to my mate Leif the scum sucking lawyer today. Despite his profession, Leif is a decent bloke. Unfortunately, he confirmed some of my worst suspicions.

Substantially, the following things are true:

1. There has been no prosecution for libel in Australia by a person against a BBS like us, but there have been defamation suits in Australia for things said electronically. In some ways, this is good because there's no case history for a BBS here which is great for cases in jurisdictions without defamation laws.

2. demon Internet in the UK were sued successfully for hosting an article on a newsgroup - and they had nothing to do with the person posting it, nothing to do with the person sueing, and didn't touch the news servers. This is the case that most closely follows our predicament. We don't have any idea who most of you are. We don't host this site to make money, and beyond a few simple things, we can't control what you say (which is good).

3. If we perform any editing function _at all_, we would be seen as the Internet Content Provider, and any legal threat would force us to delete the article unless someone could pony up say $10-50k to retain someone to fight back. I'm telling you now that deletion would most likely take place.

4. If we don't perform any editing function _at all_, our ISP as the Internet Content Hoster would probably act upon our entire site if a legal threat is received. After working for a few months at Optus Net, I know that even large ISPs are very nervous of lawyers and would definitely shut us down than face potential legal action. Think about this simple fact: it costs maybe a hundred or so in hosting fees a month to run this site, of which we use up mostly in non-peered bandwidth charges to our ISP. A single lawyer letter can destroy a year's profitability for an ISP from that customer. There is really no reason to do anything but cut off their airsupply. It's happened before in Australia and it'll happen again.

5. Jim is the natural entity in this case. Brad funds the bandwidth, and therefore he has risk too. Any of the helpers (such as me or the other moderators) also have some risk of being served (depends on if the lawyers can identify us). Problem being that most of the active helpers also post here, thus we theoretically should be aware of potentially defamatory material being posted and the fact that we *could* take action against defamatory posts.

Anyway, on to some other points. The server is in Brisbane as far as I can tell. Certainly the company hosting us is. For legal purposes, the server is in Queensland's jurisdiction, which has actual laws regarding defamation rather than just common law. However, the Gutnick case has just made it harder for us; whereas Queensland law used to be the only one we had to worry about, we can be theoretically sued in any state now. This is bad as S.15 of Qld's defamation act protects the truth as a protection as long as it's in the public interest...

I came this >< close to being sued for defamation in 1992 after posting a bunch of truthful statements (and one or two statements that I should have prefixed with "In my opinion, ..." about someone to aus.general in late 1991. I am not going to repeat it as I don't know if said person is dead yet and it's better to not repeat it. If I had been sued, I would have made world legal history. It was also the first and only time I've made the front page of the Age IT section. After their appalling treatment, I make it a point of not speaking to them ever again. After his lawyers figured out that I had nothing (at the time), and after discussions with legal aid, I agreed to apologise, which I did.

Truth is not a defense unless you're filthy rich. It can cost a fortune to get to the point where you can say and show that you were telling the truth, and maybe even for the public good. This is exactly what happened to me - I simply couldn't afford to go through the process to prove that this character did and was exactly as I said.

Until you've been sued for defamation, do not say "You can't be sued for saying the truth" as it's complete bullshit. The actual statement should be: "You cannot be sued successfully for saying the truth in a non-malicious way in some states and terrorities. No matter how the judgement goes, it's going to cost an arm and leg to get there".

The truth is not one of the three things that a defamed person must show to say that they've been defamed, so they can start the process even if you told the truth, and in the public interest. More than one politician has a pool or a summer house because of this. I strongly recommend you lot read "Guilty Secrets". Although written in the early 1990's, there has been little to no tort reform in this area.

FYI, I voted no to this poll. I don't think it's going to help. I would prefer to simply reach consensus with Brad and Jim and delete those most egregarious posts. But that's the easy way out. I am prepared to help as long as you folks are prepared to help yourselves out and realistically just want a good outcome for all concerned.

Andrew

Not sure if this stems from my post "he gonna rip you off"Which infact I took from a band called the Dead Kennedys song.Its a protest song with a verse that says"Trust your mechanic to mend your car,You bring it into his garage,he tightens and Loosens a few spare parts,One things fixed another thing falls apart,And the rich eat you!ETC ETC.It was a simple little post.I just wanted to voice my opinion.Which from all the bitchen and winging and typical boring car club bullshit.Man maybe this is why the VW scenes so small in Aus.People to scared off the old "IN" crowed.Cant be different .go with the flow.What attracted me to this site{the original site]was the people that were advertising it when it first started ie;Jim Gow.Had a mad car something different all the goodies.So I logged on I admit i was new to the VW community having just joined the VWCV.That was probably 3 years ago.I was dumb didnt know to much about flat 4s having grown up around the rod scene.I was a bit of an outcast to them but they trulley dont care for Bitchen.And they would usually sort something like this out "The old way"And Im sure there would be no sueing go on.So this sight was the coolest thing and still is.There are some trulley mad people on here who I read there post frequently for knowledge and a laugh.I wouldnt bother involving this sight for a bitch or a winge cause Im really here for those two projects [my vws] that I love and enjoy and really There what its all about...THE CARS.So if it was my post that got the tiny vic vw scene upset email me let me know "..

Kustom,

It's not the vic VW crowd. In fact, I'd say most of the helpers are from states other than Victoria, Brad's from QLD, and a goodly percentage of the moderators are from NSW. This is a national board, which is excellent.

No one as far as I can tell is upset. No one is suing anyone, although Brad did have some feedback about your post from the other side of the fence.

Basically, I am doing this poll to see what everyone wants rather than just doing what's easiest for the admins.

The "old way" of setting disputes doesn't work any more. We need to be careful of dotting the i's and dashing the t's. I'm sure most of us would never consider getting lawyers involved, just settle their differences in heated exchanges and someone goes off for a while. But businesses are different. It's their livelihoods at stake and the VW crowd is now small enough that a board like us that has maybe 50-60% of all VW owners on it (and maybe upto 80% of the ones that count - those who lots of work) can force them out of business if we're not absolutely even handed.

So that's why I am proposing this method. It may not work, in which case we revert to deleting defamatory posts, but until we try, we wont know.

Anyway, see it as a free service that we're offering you, which is not whinging, it's doing something positive. I just hope it doesn't cause me or any of the other admins any grief.

Andrew

[Edited on 22-2-2003 by vanderaj]

Personally I wouldnt like to see any bad mouthing at all on the forum, because I've seen what can happen from both sides.

When I worked for hellbug (only for about 6 months casual) I had 2 very strong complaints from customers and both had no foundation whatsoever.

On one car after doing a minor service, just oil change and grease type stuff, the car left the workshop fine and came back that afternoon on a flatbed missing one wheel. The owner was freaking because his car had suffered damage, fair enough. But it wasnt my fault. I didnt loosen his wheelnuts. I didnt have his wheels off. He was screaming about sueing, his big burley brother was screaming about ripping my bosses head off, but it wasnt anything to do with us. Even though he was 100% sure it was. The only thing I could be blamed for was if the strainer plate fell off. If this guy was a member of this forum he would have posted here for sure.

Another time after a full service a guy came in screaming I hadnt done anything and was ripping him off. His "new" plugs were dirty, his points had grease on them, etc etc. Tried to explain that I put grease on his points to stop them from wearing out, and his plugs were grubby cos I dont wash my hands in between service items. This guy was dead set certain that nothing had been done to his car, when it did have a full service. He would have posted too.

In contrast I changed a steering box on a beetle one day and forgot to tighten the steering coupling bolt. It fell out when she was half way home and she had no steering at all. This lady wouldnt have posted even though I could easily have had her killed by my negligence. It was a one off mistake and I dont think that hellbug should have had ongoing problems because of it, despite how serious it was.

(i've thought of another one) a t3 leaking water from the LH head. The right one started leaking shortly after. I plead not guilty your worship.

On the other hand I've gotten a $20 tip! Off an Australian! Go figure. The customer is NOT always right. Any company living by that rule is ripping off good customers to please bad ones.

I think if you've had a rough deal tell your mates, but keep it off here.

I think we are looking at alot of trouble if you put a complaints poll up. Simply if you don't like a place don't go there or email, u2u or anything else which is from you to the person asking. Keep it private and this place stays out of trouble.

I agree lets just keep it off here.And enjoy this site and our dubs off course.Vand wasnt calling you guys wingers you now who I was talking about..

i agree,this seems to be getting out of hand,if you dont like the place,dont go there,and i would say most people on this forum would be self confessed backyard guys,so lets keep mates rates going around to keep on dubbin. i dont think there is enought vw only work shops around,and for that reason they seem to get into many complants,and most local dudes just think its to old to worry about,
there is a fine line in freedom of speach
anyway guys keep up the good work.....
cheers :beer:beer:beer:beer

In my opinion we live in a free country, I am proud to be, and as a mature adult I will say what I like. Opinion, truth, fact. I would not have any guilt about it.
I have enough pride and confidence in myself to know that what I will say wont make me look like a loser to the general population.
If I am wrong I will admit it.

Cant be fairer than that

I dunno where people get this stupid idea that we live in a free country.

The only thing that makes us free is that we get to vote for the guy who dictates us for 3 years.

Im starting to think we should get a vote in US elections too!

[size=4]I will be honest... (Yes! I normally am) I didn't read ALL the posts ... otherwise I would be writing this on Monday.... After a good think - a few weeks - IMHO - If You Believe someone has done the wrong thing or made a mistake etc - Tell YOUR Mates - I believe IMHO that it would be detrimental to this Forum --- As there are many people who think that if their car is serviced - oil changed etc - and a front wheel falls off or a tie rod or ball joint fails - its THEIR Fault - they serviced the Car.... !!
Now , very few of Us are Certified Mechanics - some of Us are Certified - BUT NOT as Mechanics LOL - IMHO - BURY the Business Complaints - All It will do - is Harm our Easy going Forum We have Here and I'm sure NO ONE Wants that..[/size]

why complaints

just if shit happens to someone they can post a message simply saying
"i will not take my busienss back to John John Auto Twats"
and with that post they must back up there reasons with a good email to one of the admins saying why they wont go back.

??????????????? Eh'??????????????
:bounce

Well Chris I would say in my opinion it is pretty free when you can say your own opinion without fear of getting shot for it, and we are also free to vote against the twit, or vote no twit or not enrol to vote at all.
Free to earn as much money as we like, and spend it how we like.
Don't like what we bought, can tell who we like.

How the heck did I get onto a politics forum. I will have to press 'back' on my browser and find that aussiveedubbers forum I was on earlier.

I think the admins must know what it is like to be an american president, having to make all the hard decesions and r88t the secratary (monica)
it must fill their days with stresssss!

just delete this whole thread and forget it ever happened !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:bounce