Everybody is “accepting” it, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Do we have to like it aswell?
Michal wrote:
folks, this is site run by Peter and if he has reason to edit/delete/not to post, we simply need to accept. If I was in his shoes, I would do the same. It´s nice to win at the court but the overhead on that….
I don’t think that anyone disagrees with that. I think Peter’s approach is entirely reasonable. I’m just pointing out that laws are not the same everywhere, even in the EU, and the amount of corporate bullying you have put up with for risk of a costly lawsuit depends on where you are based.
It could be worse. On PPRuNe there is an airline that can’t be named at all in any context because of legal threats.
This is irrelevant when the cost of a defence barrister is of the order of 10k for the first day’s work. With the 100k indemnity from Alexis that would cover 10 days, which may be enough 
There is a much bigger factor however; touched on here. The GA scene is really small. If you p1ss off one company, you could easily p1ss off the only company in your country which is any good, or the only company in Europe which can do the work you want done. The result of this is that most people cover up issues, for pragmatic reasons.
Peter is fully right here.
Today, it is completely enough that a company is threatening to sue or actually do it to close a forum. So it is nothing but diligence to take such things seriously and delete any offending post.
No, it is not nice, yes it is a restriction to free speech (which doesn’t exist anyhow) but such claims can very quickly consume tens of thousands of Euros without any chance of getting any of it ever compensated, even if you win the court case. The whole thing costs, time, money and is a huge risk.
The only remedy is to pay for an insurance for legal costs, but again, someone has to foot the bill for that.
It is different if a forum is part of a newspaper or something similar, as they will have to be covered against legal costs some way or the other anyway, otherwise they can not ever be independent in their reporting. One single claim could wipe out the whole company easily, if that was not the case.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It is different if a forum is part of a newspaper or something similar, as they will have to be covered against legal costs some way or the other anyway, otherwise they can not ever be independent in their reporting. One single claim could wipe out the whole company easily, if that was not the case.
I don’t know if it is an EU rule or a purely Swedish legislation but in Sweden a web site can be registered as a newspaper. That means that a whole lot of legal protection suddenly applies. The flip side is that a named publisher is personally responsible for everything that’s written but OTOH they get the full legal protection that a proper newspaper would have. E.g. it is much more difficult to convict a newspaper for libel. This has some interesting effects. There is a Swedish website which has made a database of all Swedish court cases etc. where you can search for anyone’s prosecutions, convictions etc. Both building such a database and making it available to the public would normally be in blatant violation of the EU personal integrity laws, but because the web site is registered as a newspaper it is in fact legal. There is talk of changing the law because of this web site.
Airborne_Again – unfortunately none of this is relevant because if one is legally challenged one cannot simply ignore it. That way (believing that one’s country has laws protecting one, etc) lies the road to ruin because you will always lose an uncontested action – unless it is so blatently outrageous that the court throws it out.
So one will always incur costs, into 3 digits as the entry level and that only covers some correspondence.
It’s fun to discuss the finer points of law but it is just like champagne socialism – you can practice it once your bank account is nicely filled up and your mortgage paid off. And there is a great deal of champagne socialism around.
The initial topic of this thread was that we will not be advertising businesses which threatened legal action against EuroGA. Or me – I am the obvious target, not just because I am a visible mod/admin here but because I have been an aircraft owner for 15+ years and have a history of doing “business” with a lot of firms, some of it quite unsatisfactory and thus resulting in those firms being hostile afterwards. Such is life in GA, as most aircraft owners will confirm. If you just rent, you won’t ever see any of this. Most of it doesn’t get posted, because most owners have such difficult maintenance arrangements (airport politics, based firms being barely ok, hangarage tied to maintenance, etc) that they cannot afford to p1ss off anybody at all.
It is a tricky decision to make but I believe it is the right one, on purely ethical grounds. People rely on reports on companies to be fairly reliable and if a company squashes negative (but truthful) posts with a legal threat, the whole thing gets unbalanced.
Airborne_Again wrote:
There is a Swedish website which has made a database of all Swedish court cases etc. where you can search for anyone’s prosecutions, convictions etc.
Not to warm anything up; but that website (along with a few similar ones, like the one where you could search for anyone’s filed tax returns, owners and history of car license plates, and a few experiences at university where they just hang up lists for everyone to see with all the grades, names and “personnummer” on them) was one of the reasons why I posted this:
I think in other countries, people don’t feel that this is normal.
That site is called facebook, no? 
BTW, to get a working link to a post, you need to right-click (or the device equivalent) on the post number
Rwy20 wrote:
Not to warm anything up; but that website (along with a few similar ones, like the one where you could search for anyone’s filed tax returns, owners and history of car license plates, and a few experiences at university where they just hang up lists for everyone to see with all the grades, names and “personnummer” on them) was one of the reasons why I posted this:Well… As my posting implied, that website is very much frowned upon and there is a law change underway to stop it. Also, my university department has not posted grade lists with “personnummer” for many years.
Peter perhaps you should set up the server in Vanuatu. Including a section in the bylaws stating that all complaints should be made in person at the front desk.
