blog.noetech.com: Lawsuit over Comments?

August 04, 2004

Lawsuit over Comments?

A women named Pola Muzyka has threatened legal action against me if I don't remove a comment she left on an entry I made about Caligola last year. Here's the correspondence so far, via email:

Pola:

Is this your site? I need to delete a comment I made a few months ago. How do I do that? Do I have to contact an attorney, do you know who owns this site, or will you be able to delete it?
Blessings,
Pola

Pola Muzyka, MTD
Christian Media News (Alliance)
Web: www.christianmediaalliance.com
Web: www.christianmediaalliance.org
E-mail: info@christianmediaalliance.com

Pola Muzyka, MTD
Christian Media News (Alliance)

Me:

Where did you leave the comment, what post and what name was it under?
--
Tom Wolf
tnoe@mac.com
http://blog.noetech.com
http://www.greekok.com
http://worldofwonder.net

Then she sent me copies of the comments

Me:

I'm going to leave those comments on my site, I don't see any reason to remove them.

Pola:

Well, then it looks like I'll have to have them legally removed. Sorry. I'm a writer and there are many typo's there. I don't know who wrote that and why but I'll get to the bottom of it and I believe that forgery is illegal even over the internet.

Me:

In your first email, you claimed your wrote it. You have no legal standing to have it removed, but have fun trying.

Notice how she at first claims to have written the comment, but now claims it was written by someone else and that it is a forgery.

I guess the easiest thing to do is to remove the comment, but I don't like being told to change something on my site, especially by someone who wrote it and posted it knowingly. If she had claimed that it was someone acting as her in the first place, then I may have removed it or added to the post mentioning it, but that's not what she did. She only mentioned the forgery after I told her I didn't see a reason to remove the comments. If anyone has any experience with something like this, I would love to hear it.

*Update* A few more emails

Pola

I didn't write it. It was a comment I made to a private party. Not a comment to be published on your site or any one else's site. It was not an interview. It was just a comment I made to someone. Who put this on your site?
I don't know who you are and my grief is not with you, unless you don't remove my personal information immediately. Whoever put that comment on your site had no business to do so. They made it look as though I did it and it includes multiple errors.

Let it be known that I am insisting that you remove my personal information immediately, this day August 5th, 2004.

Well, if you did say it, then it is not a forgery, it's a quote, correctly attributed I might add.
I have no way of knowing who posted that comment.

Pola

I said the comment but not to you, and I said it in private. It was written incorrectly and quoted incorrectly. It is not accurate, as I said before. Whoever put it there, had no business putting my name to it. The fact that you are continuing to hold incorrect information on your site even after you've been told to remove it by the person it slanders, makes it wrong. Check your provider rules.

While now the comment is slander...not sure how that works as she admits to having said it. Anyway, I'm done, I don't care. If they want to sick a lawyer on me fine, then I'll just remove the fucking thing. Until then, it stays. But she can leave a comment saying she didn't write the others, really I don't know why she just doesn't do that?

tommy at 10:51 PM in Weblog | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Check IP logs. That'll at least help confirm whether she's telling the truth about it being forged.

If it is, indeed, an impostor, it would be good of you to blatantly modify the comment to indicate that such has been discovered, but once it's clear to anyone who reads it that this person isn't the one who made it, I see no legal reason you'd have to take it down.

Posted by: Lee Bennett at August 5, 2004 10:29 PM

The IP log doesn't really give my any answers because I don't have anything to compare it to. The two comments left on the entry do come from what appears to be to different networks. That can mean to things, that two different people left them, or they were left from two different places, ie work and home.

Posted by: Thomas Wolf at August 6, 2004 08:25 AM

Hey, this is Joshua Muzyka, Pola's son. This is utterly ridiculous. Please don't lie about my mother and if you insist of disrespecting a 56 year old womans wishes and posting her emails to you on your website at least put the whole thing there instead of cutting up to make you look good ok? Oi, this is annoying. Oh....and my mother works at home. She only sends off of one computer. Her G4 in her "office" here at home. Also, she didn't post the comment. She said she "made it" meaning she was talking to someone and obviously someone else put it up. My mother isn't a tech geek so when she says "made" a comment she's not talking about the internet. ((takes a few seconds to read the post)) Oh my God! LOL! You think my mother wrote that? LOL!! Oh man, this'll give me a good laugh at work today. No...mom wouldn't start out a sentence with "You fools!!". Oh...one more thing...this was the last email that WASN'T posted on the site...

"I said the comment but not to you, and I said it in private. It was written incorrectly and quoted incorrectly. It is not accurate, as I said before. Whoever put it there, had no business putting my name to it. The fact that you are continuing to hold incorrect information on your site even after you've been told to remove it by the person it slanders, makes it wrong. Check your provider rules. "

Please be respectful and end this silly thing. This isn't getting us anywhere. Actually, you're acting more like a child that got up his first website and wants to piss someone off to get hits. heh...and your how old?

-Joshua

Posted by: Joshua Muzyka at August 7, 2004 07:31 AM

I didn't lie, those are directly copied and pasted from her emails, in their entirety. The last email wasn't posted because I hadn't received it when I made this entry, but I had every intention to do so, I don't think it makes me look bad at all.

And again, she made the comment to someone, it's not fraud like she claimed. She is free to leave a comment saying she didn't make the one left by "her". I'm just not going to remove a comment because someone doesn't like what it said.

If she had simply asked me to amend it, or just told me she didn't leave it and someone was using her name, I would have done something. But I don't take to being threatened very well.

What's so weird to me is why is this such a big deal? The comment isn't offensive. Is it that she doesn't want to be associated with Caligua? Few people read this site and no one who knows your mother anyway.

And I did let it go, I stopped responding to her emails, and after this I done with it completely.

Posted by: Thomas Wolf at August 7, 2004 11:37 AM