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We go to the doctor because we trust our doctor to help us feel better when there is something wrong with us, and in turn our doctor trusts the pharmaceutical companies to provide medications that are safe to be prescribed to their patents for the treatment of serious conditions. THE FDA attempts to ensure that the medications that reach the consumer level are as safe as they can be, but that is not always the case. Sometimes a medication will slip through with undiscovered side effects, sometimes side effects that are not discovered until long after the drug has made it into mainstream use. That is the kind of situation that AstraZeneca found itself in when their drug Crestor came under scrutiny by the FDA a few years ago for what CBS News reported as being misleading safety claims in the advertising.
So what happens when a drug that has slipped through the intense scrutiny that medications are supposed to go through before they are deemed safe for the consumer? In some cases there can be lawsuits when a drug has been linked to serious side effects. The attorneys of O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath handle issues such as those that would be faced in a Crestor lawsuit and know that such injuries may not be the fault of the consumer when it comes to prescribed drugs.
O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath is based in Austin Texas, see website linked above for full information.
If you are a business owner, then the last thing you want to see is a negative review of your business. It feels terrible. Trust me, I know, I am a writer.
It seems to me that writers take criticism better than many others. Perhaps we just have thicker skins? Or maybe we have been trained that being criticized is part of being a writer? Twenty years ago, when I first started to write, I submitted a short story to a critique group I was a member of at that time. The story was nothing fancy, just your basic spaceship crew investigates why a mining colony has stopped communicating, finds nearly everyone was killed after they unearthed a dormant nest of nasties deep down in the mine. I got the idea from a news piece at the time about Io and the possibility of finding useful material in the ice, coupled with another report that there could possibly be life down under the ice sheets of Io. One of the reviews I got back from the group was scathing, not for my writing, but for me! I was accused of ripping off Heinlein, whom I have never read. I’m more of a fantasy genre person, and just had a muse tickled by news reports so whipped out a shirt SciFi story. The lesson I learned: there are no original plots.
I kept right on writing. I now make my living as a writer; granted, it’s advertisement copywriting that pays the bills, but I still work from time to time on my novels and short stories as well. I do not hold any ill will toward the fellow that accused me of ripping off Heinlein, it was his perspective on the situation and I took that perspective and let it make me into a better writer. Which is why I do not understand why other professions do not take a cue from writers and take the bad with the good.
Everyone has an opinion, and the best we can do is to make sure we give reasons for more good opinions than bad opinions. This is of particular importance in the age of the Internet, where a review of a company (good or bad) is able to be linked to, commented on, and lives forever in the silica landscape of Cyber Space.
A 2009 article on a lawsuit that was filed over a negative review on the website Yelp includes a statement by a Yelp spokeswoman who said: “Most businesses engage constructively with customers who haven’t had a good experience. When that doesn’t work, they recognize that they can’t always make one hundred percent of their customers happy one hundred percent of the time, and don’t risk the huge expense and potential negative publicity that comes with suing one of their customers.”
And that is what people seem to forget. In so many cases, there is far more harm done by a lawsuit than a negative review could ever have done. If, rather than filing a lawsuit, the person had practiced good business and improved their business based on the negative criticism, their reputation would have been so much better off.
Take for instance the above mentioned lawsuit. The customer of a business gave the business a negative review on Yelp. The business owner took offense and asked the person to remove the review, stating that it was all a misunderstanding of his office procedures and that the review unjustly characterized him as being unethical and dishonest. The business was, in fact, a sponsored advertiser on Yelp at the time, and encouraged his customers to write reviews on the website. The person who wrote the negative review removed it two days after they were sent a letter by the business owner’s attorney threatening a lawsuit if the review was not removed. One month later – the lawsuit was filed.
The review, according to an article on the case, caused no decline in the number of referrals that the business received from Yelp, however, after the business owner opened the lawsuit there were fewer referrals – this according to the defendant’s attorney, who cited Yelp documents as the source of the information.
So, by filing a lawsuit against someone that had given them a negative review, the business did far more harm than the review ever could have. And that is not a unique situation. Consider the case of Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who recently filed a lawsuit against the Washington City Paper. An article in the newspaper, accompanied by a picture of Snyder on which devil features had been doodled in pen, listed reasons that the writer felt Snyder was a bad owner. Snyder felt that he was “forced” to file a lawsuit to protect his good name and reputation. Unfortunately for him, the lawsuit did far more to harm his reputation and name than the article ever could have.
The lawsuit lead to public scrutiny – via Twitter – of Snyder’s prior activities and gained the attention of the media. Because of the lawsuit many people that might not have seen the article sought it out to read it. Worse, for Snyder, people began to look into his past on their own and started discussing it online in blogs and on social networking sites.
Snyder’s reputation would have been much better off had he ignored the article, and instead focused on what he could do to counter the comments that had been made about him.
And those are not the only situations where a lawsuit has caused the person who felt they were defamed or slandered to end up doing themselves more harm by opening a lawsuit than the item they found offensive and are suing for. Since I can name several cases, I am sure there must be many more situations where a lawsuit has done far more harm than the original bad publicity. There might be instances where legal action is the right move, however, I think that if one looks at what has come from such lawsuits, it would be discovered that in many instances the damage done to a person or company by filing a lawsuit, is far worse than the perceived defamation or slander ever was.
My advice to anyone thinking that they might sue someone for a bad review or a bad article about them or their business, would be to first consider what kind of response the lawsuit might spark in the media and social networking sites. Then consider if it might be better to simply correct the issues the review or article brought up and build a solid reputation going forward that would not leave one open to negative reviews or articles. Especially if, such as is the case with Snyder, there are things in one’s past that would be raised by the discussions a lawsuit sparks.
I just realized that I have been spending far too long this evening / morning reading over bad writing with the same kind of morbid ‘what the—’ that makes a person stare at something that they really do not want to look at. So, why would I spend so long reading seriously badly misspelled words? Well, they were sort of connected to me. I’m not going to go into any details here, mainly because I am not sure that it is worth giving the person in question the attention they seek by going into details, but I will say that I have learned a few things.
First, the importance of knowing how to spell if you are going to be writing. Or at least using a spell checker, since most of the blatant errors I have been wading through were seriously blatant spelling errors.
Second, that someone can sue a third party for “loss of marital consortium”. …… yeah, I was stopped short when I read that. I had to go look it up, because surely it can’t mean what it looks like, right? Well… LexisNexis, the Iowa Law Review, defines it thus:
…. Loss of consortium is an action that has existed in various forms for centuries. 1 At early common law, only a husband was able to bring a consortium action for the loss of his wife’s marital services. …..
…. The modern action for loss of consortium permits either spouse to sue for loss of the other’s love, society, affection, or sexual relations ….
So, uhh, yeah. It really does mean that a man can sue someone who he feels has caused his wife to stop performing her ‘wifely duties’.
Third, I just wasted a lot of sleep time that I will never get back, and the end result is being left wanting to speak up about someone that has in a roundabout manner dragged me into something I have no time or actual desire to be involved in. But tell me, how exactly does someone easily ignore having it implied that they are unethical? How does someone ignore it when a person brings up their deceased mother and insinuates that she was a bad mother in how she raised her children, in how I was taught? How does one ignore insinuations by someone that never knew them or their parents that they were neglected as a child?
I don’t know. I have been trying to think for a while now if I should respond to the insinuations that were made about me, but I think I will try to leave that to others to respond to for at least a few more days. I will raise one question, however, since it is still puzzling me.
The person who made a not-so-round-about attack on my character and ethical position as an Internet Journalist, brought up something about Click Fraud. They outright accused someone else (not connected to my family) of having performed click fraud – which means boosting the number of clicks on something such as Google AdSense ads. Now the way they explained it was that someone had claimed to have clicked on someone else’s ads to make money… I have been an AdSense participant for many years, and I will tell you that in my understanding of the program, you can not go to someone else’s website and make money by clicking on the ads on that other person’s website. That person would make the money. So… how can the person in question that is insinuating click fraud seriously accuse someone else of making money by clicking on the accuser’s ads? I don’t understand that. And it is confusing enough that I apologize for the headache I likely just gave you trying to puzzle it through. I’ll go ask people in the Internet Advertisement Copywriting community.
I am going to go get an aspirin for the headache I have after the last seven hours of reading through posts that were attacks on myself via attacking my family, then get some much needed sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long day, and I already lost far too much work time to trying to sort out what I had missed by not following what was being said about my family until last night. I’m still wanting to respond directly to the negative insinuations made about my ethical character, and the attacks that were levied against my mom. Instead, I will go get some sleep, and calm myself down, and yes, if you know my number, or instant messenger information, you can call and get all the details I am not posting here – just… wait until afternoon, please?
Oh, and, for the record. My name is Sandra Fikes. And yes, I do make money via my websites and blogs, and if I decide that the issue is worth my time I will be discussing it on a website that supports itself with advertising. I was quite content to ignore the situation, and would not even have bothered to read up about it for at least another month or two, had the person in question not made it a point to drag me into things, insinuated I am unethical, and made provably untrue and slanderous insinuations about my parents.
The Blu-Ray Menace; or, Who Really Owns Star Wars?, a recent article in the Time online column Tuned In, raises the question of who an established work belongs to: its creator, or its fans? James Poniewozik, the author of the article, clarifies that he is not talking in terms of legal ownership, rather the question is one of moral ownership. Specifically, can the creator of a work go back and make modifications to that work, even if the fans of the originally released version cry foul?
The question is raised because of the reaction of some fans to the addition of an outcry of “No!” in the scene in which Darth Vader throws Emperor Palpatine to his death in Return of the Jedi. Added for the Blue-Ray release of the original three Star Wars movies (Numbers 4, 5 and 6 for those who know the Star Wars numbering system), the outcry has caused an echo among the fans of the original movies, and raised a question. Does Lucas have the right to make that change? Or has he, for lack of a better way to phrase it, given the story to its fans in a finished form that can never be altered?
Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” And that it is true, for what artist is ever fully satisfied with something they have created. Who can not see ways in which to improve something they created, even after it has been called finished. Should someone be able to go back and add, or remove, something in the interest of making their creation more like what they envision for it to be? Does a man, like Lucas, have the right to make changes to their creation when a new version is going to be released?
  Fans can be a treacherous slope to some creators. By now most of us are likely familiar with Stephen King’s horror novel Misery. A story in which an obsessed fan keeps her favorite author prisoner and forces him to write a new novel about her beloved character, just for her. Such extreme cases can only be hoped to be confined to the realm of fiction, but there is definitely a strong connection to someone else’s fictional creations when it comes to fans. This connection level varies along a very broad spectrum, one that could be an article on its own, and includes a sub-group of fans who, unlike the fanatical fan of King’s novel, write their own stories when the creator of a series has failed to write what they want.
The intricacies of copyright law and fan made works is a complexity that fills multiple volumes of books, and it narrows down to a simple focal point: Who controls the base creative product?
A significant number of artists, both writers and the creators of television shows and movies, set a precarious balance with their fans. Creators such as Gene Roddenberry and J.K. Rowling have been known to express their approval for fan made stories, while others, such as Anne McCaffery, creator of The Dragonriders of Pern series, were as equally well known to abolish any instance of fan made material as soon as it was discovered. McCaffery has recently changed her stance on fan made works, but it is still a precarious companionship for most creators. And not without good cause.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of the Darkover series, was extremely outspoken in her support of fan made stories set in the world she had created. Bradley even went so far as to voice disapproval with those, such as the Conan Doyle estate, who would seek to squash fan made fiction. In Fan Fiction and Copyright , Aaron Schwabach quotes Bradley as having said of fan made stories in her Darkover setting:
When I was a little kid, I was a great lover of “pretend” games, but after I was nine or ten, I could never get anyone to play them with me … And now I have a lot of fans, and friends, who will come into my magic garden and play the old “pretend games” with me.
Far, far away somewhere in the middle of the Galaxy, and about four thousand years from now, there is a world with a great red sun and four moons. Won’t you come and play with me there?
The idyllic shared play that Bradley loved was ended, and she withdrew all of her permissions and placed a ban on fan made works, following an incident in which Bradley was accused of plagiarism by a fan. The fan demanded equal collaborative and monetary credit for one of the stories that Bradley was writing, claiming the idea to have come from a story the fan had written set in Bradley’s Darkover world. It resulted in Bradley’s publisher refusing to publish the novel in an effort to avoid a lawsuit, and in authors everywhere taking a strong second look at fan made work.
Before the age of the Internet, Lucasfilm seemed to recognize the importance of fans to a work such as Star Wars when they created a licensing bureau for fan fiction:
At the height of the original Star Wars phenomenon, Lucasfilm was wary of giving its stamp of approval to the tremendous amount of fan fiction being published. Their solution, according to Gran, was to set up a no-fee licensing bureau that reviewed material and offered criticism about what might be considered copyright infringement.
After the 1990′s, the Lucasfilm stance shifted, but remained marginally accepting of some forms of fan works, according to a November 7, 1999 article at Space.com:
Fan fiction not welcome
While the news indicates that the Star Wars empire is taking a few cautious steps toward an “open source” model, Lucas is far from giving away all the keys to his kingdom.
The site is very stringent about only wanting “parodies and documentaries” — no “attempts to expand on the Star Wars universe will be accepted,” ensuring that George Lucas and the company he founded remain the only sources for canonical information and stories about Star Wars and its characters.
And that focuses us back to the key point here: Who has controlling power over a created work? Does the creator have the right to go back and modify a story before a second publication, or do they owe something to the fans and therefore must leave it forever as it was when it was initially released?
Can the creator never make modifications to craft their artwork into something more like what they envisioned it could be? Yes, there is a certain level of ‘It’s finished now, leave it alone,’ that is presumed. And in the case of a marble sculpture there is always the chance that one more chisel strike will break it, but is it not the right of the creator to adjust a bit here or there to make it more like what they want it to be – even at the risk of destroying their own creation.
Perhaps with all of the extras that the Blue-Ray format can accommodate there could be a copy of the original unmodified version of Star Wars included in the Blue-Ray edition, along with the Director’s Vision version. That way the fans who want to see the movie they saw in the theater can watch the original version, and those who want to see the movie George Lucas wanted to make can watch the Director’s Vision edition. Allowing them to see what Lucas now wishes he had thought to do before he released the movies the first time.
Whether or not Lucas includes an original edition with the Director’s Vision, the basic foundation of the matter remains the same. George Lucas, and anyone that has created a world and characters, should be able to adjust their creation if they feel it is necessary. The fans can complain, but in the end, it is up to the creator to make the final decision on whether they listen to what others say, or follow their hearts and create the story and world they wanted to the first time around.
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Critique This
Thank you for reading the entire article. I know it was a long one for the internet. I wrote it as practice for writing magazine length articles, so now that you have finished it I would welcome any critiques you might have on it. If you see something that was done wrong, or if there is something you particularly like about the article, please leave a critique comment on it. Your comments on this article will assist me in writing better articles in the future.
I am looking for the following:
1) Did you see a single underlying point within the article? What was it? Did I stay on point?
2) Was the article easy to read, or did you have to force yourself to finish it? Was the article too long? (1,349 words)
3) Did I answer all of the questions the article raised?
Anything else you might want to comment on would be appreciated, and I have a thick skin, so if you think I made a million grammatical errors and can’t write my way out of a paper bag, please let me know. I’m doing this to learn to improve my skills in article writing, so tear it apart.
Thank you!
Well, so much for sleeping anytime soon. I just finished downloading Daz 3D from the Daz website. I’m not sure just how long their limited time has been or will be going on, but when I just downloaded the program it was marked down from the normal $49.95 to free, they say until October 31, 2011.
If you check the Daz Studio 4 page for the basic Daz Studio 4 program it has a 100% markdown through October 31st. I just went through the full checkout process and sure enough, downloaded for free and it is now up and running on my computer.
So, why, you might ask, do I need Daz if I have Blender? Well, I got it because I was looking for how to use Poser files in Blender and someone had said that Daz can open Poser files and export them as files that Blender can read. So Daz is my bridge between the multitude of things that I can find to get for Poser but that are not available for Blender. 
I’m still not certain what else Daz will be used for, but it looks promising for my plans to create character representations and mini movies for my websites.
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Is it true that even bad press is good?
If you are a business owner, then the last thing you want to see is a negative review of your business. It feels terrible. Trust me, I know, I am a writer.
It seems to me that writers take criticism better than many others. Perhaps we just have thicker skins? Or maybe we have been trained that being criticized is part of being a writer? Twenty years ago, when I first started to write, I submitted a short story to a critique group I was a member of at that time. The story was nothing fancy, just your basic spaceship crew investigates why a mining colony has stopped communicating, finds nearly everyone was killed after they unearthed a dormant nest of nasties deep down in the mine. I got the idea from a news piece at the time about Io and the possibility of finding useful material in the ice, coupled with another report that there could possibly be life down under the ice sheets of Io. One of the reviews I got back from the group was scathing, not for my writing, but for me! I was accused of ripping off Heinlein, whom I have never read. I’m more of a fantasy genre person, and just had a muse tickled by news reports so whipped out a shirt SciFi story. The lesson I learned: there are no original plots.
I kept right on writing. I now make my living as a writer; granted, it’s advertisement copywriting that pays the bills, but I still work from time to time on my novels and short stories as well. I do not hold any ill will toward the fellow that accused me of ripping off Heinlein, it was his perspective on the situation and I took that perspective and let it make me into a better writer. Which is why I do not understand why other professions do not take a cue from writers and take the bad with the good.
Everyone has an opinion, and the best we can do is to make sure we give reasons for more good opinions than bad opinions. This is of particular importance in the age of the Internet, where a review of a company (good or bad) is able to be linked to, commented on, and lives forever in the silica landscape of Cyber Space.
A 2009 article on a lawsuit that was filed over a negative review on the website Yelp includes a statement by a Yelp spokeswoman who said: “Most businesses engage constructively with customers who haven’t had a good experience. When that doesn’t work, they recognize that they can’t always make one hundred percent of their customers happy one hundred percent of the time, and don’t risk the huge expense and potential negative publicity that comes with suing one of their customers.”
And that is what people seem to forget. In so many cases, there is far more harm done by a lawsuit than a negative review could ever have done. If, rather than filing a lawsuit, the person had practiced good business and improved their business based on the negative criticism, their reputation would have been so much better off.
Take for instance the above mentioned lawsuit. The customer of a business gave the business a negative review on Yelp. The business owner took offense and asked the person to remove the review, stating that it was all a misunderstanding of his office procedures and that the review unjustly characterized him as being unethical and dishonest. The business was, in fact, a sponsored advertiser on Yelp at the time, and encouraged his customers to write reviews on the website. The person who wrote the negative review removed it two days after they were sent a letter by the business owner’s attorney threatening a lawsuit if the review was not removed. One month later – the lawsuit was filed.
The review, according to an article on the case, caused no decline in the number of referrals that the business received from Yelp, however, after the business owner opened the lawsuit there were fewer referrals – this according to the defendant’s attorney, who cited Yelp documents as the source of the information.
So, by filing a lawsuit against someone that had given them a negative review, the business did far more harm than the review ever could have. And that is not a unique situation. Consider the case of Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who recently filed a lawsuit against the Washington City Paper. An article in the newspaper, accompanied by a picture of Snyder on which devil features had been doodled in pen, listed reasons that the writer felt Snyder was a bad owner. Snyder felt that he was “forced” to file a lawsuit to protect his good name and reputation. Unfortunately for him, the lawsuit did far more to harm his reputation and name than the article ever could have.
The lawsuit lead to public scrutiny – via Twitter – of Snyder’s prior activities and gained the attention of the media. Because of the lawsuit many people that might not have seen the article sought it out to read it. Worse, for Snyder, people began to look into his past on their own and started discussing it online in blogs and on social networking sites.
Snyder’s reputation would have been much better off had he ignored the article, and instead focused on what he could do to counter the comments that had been made about him.
And those are not the only situations where a lawsuit has caused the person who felt they were defamed or slandered to end up doing themselves more harm by opening a lawsuit than the item they found offensive and are suing for. Since I can name several cases, I am sure there must be many more situations where a lawsuit has done far more harm than the original bad publicity. There might be instances where legal action is the right move, however, I think that if one looks at what has come from such lawsuits, it would be discovered that in many instances the damage done to a person or company by filing a lawsuit, is far worse than the perceived defamation or slander ever was.
My advice to anyone thinking that they might sue someone for a bad review or a bad article about them or their business, would be to first consider what kind of response the lawsuit might spark in the media and social networking sites. Then consider if it might be better to simply correct the issues the review or article brought up and build a solid reputation going forward that would not leave one open to negative reviews or articles. Especially if, such as is the case with Snyder, there are things in one’s past that would be raised by the discussions a lawsuit sparks.