We Get Heat - Not The Sunshine Variety

For this post, we are going to enlighten you as to what can happen in the world in which we work.

First of all, we need to make a few things clear.

The content of mails that have been submitted to us have had some data removed (contact details only) to prevent them from suffering from spam. Other than that, the body of the mails are left intact and as is.

We have sought legal advice from a number of jurisdictions to understand exactly where we stand, and how we can most objectively deal with the situation that has arisen as you will see in this post.

For the non IT savvy out there, we need to make a couple of technical points clear too.

A private web domain is a web domain that is owned by a person or company, and that person or company is responsible for the content that they publish. They are not however responsible technically for what others may externally publish to their domain except in certain circumstances.

An open source blog platform that is provided by a company, in most cases provides that service through sub domains. The difference between the two would appear thus;

www.mywebsite.com would be a private web domain and,

mywebsite.blogspot.com is a blog platform domain, entirely different from the former, and in effect "leased" with or without charge to the user.

Ok. Back to the reason for this post. Upon checking for comments earlier today, we found the following sent by a Mr Stevenson.

Dear Mr Stevenson.

It is with extreme annoyance that I find it necessary to contact you once again regarding the investment property rumours blogspot.The last time we contacted you, despite your disavowals of any link, you modified the content accordingly. However, you have now posted recent attacks on our company which are untrue, and serve no purpose other than to deliberately target our company and personnel in an attempt to damage our reputation.We now demand that the article referring to bait and switch is removed. It is libelous, and copies of the article have been made by us, and forwarded to our lawyers.If the article is not removed within 12 hours, we will be instructing our lawyers to pursue you personally, as well as any company or blog that you hide behind.Your immediate action is required.

Regards
Chris Bulow
Business and IT Manager

Followed by;

Dear Mr Bulow.

I will once again reiterate that whilst we do own the domain for www.investmentpropertyrumours.com, we do not publish anything on the domain itself, and no content is present at all at that domain, from us, or anyone else.

The blog I presume that you are once again refferring to is hosted by Google, (hence "blogsopt") in the address.

We did submit a copy of the last mail you sent to us to the blog publisher through their comments section, along with our response. Their subsequent actions of which we have no control or influence over. We will also submit this and your e-mail to their comments section in the same fashion. You could do this yourself as well I would imagine, which would give you a direct contact to them.

I personally have posted no personal comment on you, your staff, your company, or anyone or thing you might be involved in, and neither Me, my Company nor our webhosts take no responsibilty for content that is not ours, and is not even published on a domain that we own or control.

I can understand the situation that you would appear to be in, but I am afraid I am not in a position to comply with your request.

Regards

Phil Stevenson.

To clarify who these people are, Mr Stevenson is the owner of the private domain

www.investmentpropertyrumours.com

Chris Bulow is the is the Business and IT manager at MRI Overseas Property.

We would like to thank Mr Stevenson for bringing this correspondence to our attention, and we would also like to state that Mr Stevenson has sent us a similar mail before, from the Mr Bulow after some postings that were made some time ago.

We would also like to state that we are not Mr Stevenson, and that Mr Stevenson has not had any involvement at all with this blog, nor any of its postings. We would also like to point out that whilst the private domain has been offered to us for sale, we have declined.

So far, this is the only form of correspondence from MRI that we are aware of. We have made clear on our blog that if anyone at all feels we are being unjust, unfair or mean to anyone, they really are encouraged to contact us direct, through the comments system. We read and respond to all comments, and will publish them were applicable, and likewise delete or remove if not appropriate. We will also modify, edit, or even remove posts if it proves that they are vastly inaccurate.

To date, we have not had any direct requests from any company we have written about to edit, remove or modify any posts. The removal of previous posts was purely down to undue threats and pressure being made on parties not involved.

After spending some time with our legal people, we have the following statement to make.

"Whilst we accept that some of our postings might be a little close to the wire, we do take into consideration ALL of the people and entities that it can/could affect. We have always stated that we will edit/remove/modify any postings if found to be inaccurate.

If MRI Overseas Property, Mr Bulow, Or their company lawyers would like to state exactly which statements in which articles are libellous, and why, we will happily address the requests with our lawyers.

We can be reached initially by posting through the comments section of this blog, and we can begin correspondence, via e-mail from there."