The Industry Standard is reporting that EDF Ventures, based in Ann Arbor, has subpoenaed The Funded in order to identify who left a negative comment about them on The Funded’s website. Presumably, EDF intends to use this information to pursue a defamation claim against the negative commenter.

Sorry EDF, but this is a pretty silly move. Is your skin really that thin? Do you really think this is the first negative thing someone has said about EDF? I mean, if you are doing ANYTHING meaningful, some people are going to love you and some are going to hate you. Think of Google and Microsoft as two prime examples huge camps of people love to worship and hate each of these companies all at the same time.

With your lawsuit, you have succeeded in thousands of entrepreneurs who would have never seen your negative review (take me for example) now (1) knowing that at least one entrepreneur believes that EDF is “to be avoided unless you are desperate” and (2) wondering why you are so worried about a negative review being out there. If you have a great reputation including a number of competing positive reviews on The Funded – people will simply dismiss this reviewer as a kook (or at a minimum someone who EDF spurned by declining to fund them).

Moreover, are you really going to sue the reviewer? While you may be able to bully the reviewer into removing the comment, there is a decent chance that the entrepreneur or someone like the Electronic Frontier Foundation will take on this case and make you prove that entrepreneurs should NOT avoid you unless desperate. This would simply be an ongoing advertisement regarding the negative commentary. You would also need to prove that the negative review actually damaged you. These are tall mountains to climb.

At a minimum, EDS, I hope you found your lawyer using Avvo. In addition to the Avvo Rating, we have great client reviews that you would find immensely helpful.

Be well (and transparent).

Mark

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 11:22 am by Mark Britton, CEO and is filed under Mark Britton Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.