Disclaimers

alliekatt

That's fine and everything that this isn't a medical board, but simply on principle it would be silly for suing someone, ie this public board, for malpractice when they don't even have a practice or a license and ultimately can't control what gets said. OK so maybe the laws here are messed up but I heard about some corporate entity suing a public forum because people exercised free speech...just because they bitched about bad customer service, basically. Geez, where I come from, the victims of said crappy customer service have more right to sue than the company who was responsible for the breakdown. That's like Ford suing you for a tire blowout that made you wreck your car...because they're saying your bad driving caused the blowout and the wreck made them look bad. And here you are in a neck brace? Whoa. Excuse me, but my logic circuits are overloading now.

OK this ties into the topic at the end...wait for it, OK?

Where I come from, bitching about bad customer service is a fundamental human right. It is so fundamental, that companies pile scads of free stuff on you if they even THINK you might be slightly annoyed. Is there a hair in your fajitas at Applebee's? Enjoy free fajitas for a week and free desserts for a year. Well, maybe not that crazy, but close.

So what I'm hearing here, is that large corporate entities, (and annoyed, irresponsible individuals looking for free money) can sue public forums on which people exercise free speech, just because people say things that could get misconstrued, or worse, say things that are true which would be bad PR. Dude I don't know about you, but that is totally not cool. The only entities that can try to interfere with free speech where I come from, are large government conspiracies that try to create false enemies in order to further large mafia/oil/drug/etc private interests under the nose of a public kept docile by paranoia, and a few years later it always comes back to bite them in the behinds...and it has been going on since 1963 when they thought they had gotten away with the perfect crime.

There's this fat guy in my country named Michael Moore, and he goes to cigarette companies and car companies and large corporate giants to publicly humiliate them on film when they refuse to discuss their safety and employee policies with him, and gets those films broadcast by the cable stations that want to carry him and the movie theatres that want to distribute his films.

Apparently, here in Ireland, everything I am hearing is that apparently, if Michael Moore did his same shtick here, the cigarette companies and car companies who are violating human rights and blatantly flouting their social responsibilities as large corporations, can sue the cable stations and theatres who choose to carry Michael Moore's movies. And the only reason they think they can get away with it, is because they're banking on the Irish fear of not wanting to look like a whinging pansy, especially in the eye of a bloodthirsty media. So they actually get away with it.

Now, nobody complain about what I just said, because it ties into my following statement which is on-topic.

People here need to learn how to bitch and complain when the time is appropriate, do it loudly, and not be ashamed of it. Because when it comes to dispensing medical advice, if someone says "I have a sore throat" and I say "Take some Vitamin C and drink lots of liquids and if it gets worse then see a doctor", and some poor schmuck has Strep and is running a 103 degree fever, this does not mean he can sue the board for mistakenly telling him that he can cure Strep with Vitamin C. It means, that he was a dumbass for not going to the doctor when his fever got too high because he didn't want to be caught 'whinging' out of fear of being in the ER for an ingrown toenail. And if someone is that much of a dumbass, and did not handle the situation with any amount of the common horse sense given a donkey, a lawsuit is not going to save him!

Pshaw. Silly. I need to become a practicing lawyer here so I can lend a good whack of common sense to the court system, if anyone thinks they can sue a public forum because people spoke freely and/or took some piece of bogus advice because they had the decisionmaking ability of a cabbage. There is personal responsibility, and then there is nanny culture. I have no idea where the attitude here comes from that blames a rape victim for wearing too short a skirt, but it's high time that attitude got shot at high noon.

Oh, and by the way, the reason for this rant, and the fear of lawsuits, by any entity of any kind, can be easily solved with a legal disclaimer saying this public forum is not personally responsible for the views expressed. Why you folks don't have one in the use agreement on signing up is beyond me. If boards.ie wants to spend money on an attorney, make up a legal disclaimer and file it with the courts. Because otherwise, you're going to be a paranoid library that is constantly scanning the book selection to make sure the Anarchist's Cookbook isn't on the shelf. That job requires WAY too many unpaid man-hours. The easy solution is to stock the damn cookbook and get a disclaimer just the same way Bus Eireann doesn't claim responsibility for your hand luggage. That way if any dumbass tries to sue you, you can show up in court and get the case dismissed the second it hits the courtroom floor. Problem solved.

Nevyn

Moved from PI, regarding this thread.

In ireland there is not free speach on internet forums.
The owners of this site are the publishers of every word that appears here
and under law are treated the same as a newspaper conglomerate.

The mod, cmods, smods and the site admin can control content by editing and deleting posts.

alliekatt

Not your fault at all, but just something that I can't get my head around...kind of like when I was on a dating site here, with my membership paid for, and found out people were actually reading the messages I sent to other people. I felt ill... and I'm actually the last person on earth who needs to be chaperoned, but when I am in a situation like that, I deliberately make the chaperons necessary. Needless to say I cancelled my direct debit subscription and contract by closing my bank account and dropping another Irish run dating website...which was fustrating because I get stuck with one extreme or the other...on the Irish sites are the nice guys because they're chaperoned, but with no freedom; and on the US sites are a lot of nice guys and a ton of scammers and scumbags too because they're given free reign. I suppose if I pick the benefits of one, I have to accept the accompanying nonsense.

If anything, it simply makes me glad that the borderlessness of the Internet allows me to be myself on US run servers. If anything I can continue to be evil on my US blog but enjoy my Irish connections free of phishing and cold calling.

Allie

jhegarty

To be exact free speech laws only apply to goverment actions...

If they applied to private business I can phone up the new york times and demand they pubish an article I wrote...