Virtual ambulance chasing: Access to Google and a law degree is not a business plan folks
Boing Boing has been on the receiving end of one or two stupid legal threats in our day but this one from the firm of Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh takes the cake, the little cake topper, the frosting and all the candles, as well as the box and the cake-stand and the ornamental forks.
Back in July, I posted about the research on the academic advantage some people with autism exhibit. In the comments, someone else used the word “scam” in a message board post that was totally unrelated to Academic Advantage (Here’s the quote: “Went to college expecting it to be the place of knowledge, an all encompassing and way to get information instantly. I quickly found its a scam…”).
Here’s where it gets good. The legal eagles at Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh represent an (apparently extremely touchy) company called Academic Advantage and they apparently earn their keep by using alerts or searches for “Academic Advantage scam” to see who’s badmouthing good old AA, and then they fire off a legal threat and demand that the content be removed from the Internet posthaste. (Funnily enough, Boing Boing isn’t even in the first screen of Google results for academic advantage scam — though there are certainly plenty of people who seems upset with AA’s service!)
This is funny, scary and very stupid. Boing Boing has received a letter from a law firm claiming they libelled a company called Academic Advantage.
The stupid part is that the page referenced had nothing to do with the company Academic Advantage at all. It was an article about some autistic people seeming to have an academic advantage over neurologically typical people.
The scary part is this could happen to anyone. It’s good that it happened to a big blog like Boing Boing as they haven’t just folded and taken down the page, but many would.
Presumably these people sit there and wait for results from Google Alerts and then fire off one of their letters. It should be a requirement that they actually read the page, but evidently it isn’t.
The funny part is that a quick search for “academic advantage scam” does yield some interesting results. This isn’t just pouring kerosene on a fire. This may well be lighting the match too.
