Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table."
Over the years I've received more SLAPPs than I can count and I cannot even recall the first one. Honestly, I cannot. Some of the more high-profile SLAPPs came from the EPO (Europe's second-largest organisation) and Novell's last CEO, who had originally come from IBM. Last year, for the first time, my wife and I both filed lawsuits (counterclaims) in response to truly ridiculous and interconnected SLAPPs [1, 2].
The SLAPPers (people behind SLAPPs) do not wish to realise this, but what they're doing isn't just costly to them (in monetary terms); it only gives even more (as in, additional or renewed) attention to what they're attempting to hide, they motivate us to write even more about the very same things they wish to suppress (since the EPO hired several law firms to stalk and extort me I've published over 4,000 more articles and videos about the EPO), and they end up with a cake in their own face. This is priceless slapstick.
SLAPPs may seem "fun" when you first send a letter or a couple of nastygrams (low budget, about 100 times cheaper than a lawsuit), but SLAPPers then get associated with all sorts of bad things, e.g. the women who allegedly had 700 drinks (Anna Palus). People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them) and unless they can afford to actually go to court and also win a case, it's not going to vindicate them. In the case of the EPO, its threatening letters which it repeatedly sent to us caused even more publicity for the main scandal they had attempted to hide. Private Eye covered us a couple of times and media across Europe spoke about the Microsoft-EPO scandal.
When Sirius issued veiled threats, even more people came out, blasting the company for threatening me and then telling the company's abuses against them (it stole money from them, not just from me and my colleagues).
Speaking for myself, SLAPPs have not scared me since I was a student. It is like "scar tissue" (hardening the area). I received some threats around 2008 (after OOXML leaks that I had published), but each SLAPP since then had only made me more joyous, as they collectively became almost like 'trophies' (if your publications/leaks have no reach/impact, there would be no effort/incentive to take them down or suppress their publication in the first).
It's happening to others this past week1, as Adobe seems determined to get the Streisand Effect repeatedly tested2. People will get even more curious and interested in what Adobe is so desperate to hide. It also shows the problems one gets for outsourcing to Google/YouTube.
Several years ago some patent lawyer who did really terrible things sent me threatening letters, not alleging that I had defamed him but that me showing a mugshot of his (his face, from the official site) constituted a copyright violation. Mike Masnick did a rebuttal to that. Masnick has been targeted by the same liar and fraud who targeted me as well.
The EPO's circle of corrupt friends also attempted to SLAPP me in recent years; it always failed [1, 2, 3] and merely served to show they think and act like in Putin's Russia. The EU has some serious introspection to do.
When you decide to SLAPP you show some teeth and bark, but you do not bite. Later on it'll turn out that your teeth are in fact dentures and you don't know how to bite, only bark.
Barking is easy. But prepare for an actual fight.
In recent years we got a whole lot of barking from Microsofters. Carry on, you only embolden us to go deeper and you encourage whistleblowers to step in, feeding us with new scoops.
Decent people do not tolerate bullies and oversensitive censors. Decent people want to know what's true, and more so suppressed truths. █
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1 Adobe & YouTube Censor & Silence Journalist
2 Adobe Makes 2nd Fraudulent Copyright Claim Against Lunduke Journal