Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 1 Out of 200: Claim No. KB-2024-001270 in a Nutshell
ORGANISATION OF THIS DOCUMENT/SERIES
This thorough document is not limited to a Defence or notes for a Defence (“Extended Defence”). It strives to reduce repetition and has multiple distinct parts. It is informal, does not follow strict rules or structure, and is composed by the Defendants, serving as a basis for a more concise and precise legal defence, or the Defence to be prepared by the Counsel (barrister).
Preceding the paragraph-by-paragraph response the Defendants lay out a timeline of events leading up to numerous empty threats, even actual legal threats, made by the Claimant, culminating in further tacit threats made years later (pre-action letters range in time; they started in 2021 but revealed an paper tiger, not any potent claims).
Statement of Strategy
The legal strategy is Truth. The articles in question already contain sufficient evidence or link to prior articles that contain sufficient evidence. Reiterating the available evidence, potentially adding more to it, is feasible.
Position
The Defendants’ position is that they themselves as the victims, but in a “first-to-file” (or more-eager-to-file) legal system even the perpetrator of abuse – more so if unemployed and depressed (or chronically obsessed to the point of despising someone) – can initiate burdensome legal proceedings, hoping to either scare the accused, encumber the accused with heavy legal fees (needed for a proper legal defence), or rely on a scarcely informed judiciary that’s not very tech-savvy and therefore struggles to keep abreast with the full, complete history. Technical jargon serves to obscure the true motivations of the Claimant, whose notoriety had been earned for about two decades already, dating back to the birth of the sites in question (whose stance he does not agree with, not as a matter of principle but as a matter of self interest).
It is truly regrettable that paths crossed with a person of such abusive history, as evidence by other victims of his, but then again he specifically targetted the Defendants as early as 2012. His goal was to discredit perfectly legitimate criticism of bad work he had done. The criticism was based on objective material, sourced from reliable and reputation people, rather than empty conjecture.
A paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown will be reactionary, i.e. a response to ambitious and tall claim that the Claimant made. The Claimant could very well be the Defendant had the Defendants chosen to file a lawsuit first, albeit that would result in financial expense and great investment of time. Moreover, the Defendants remind and will continue to remind that the Claimant is not here in the UK and has not lived in the UK for a very long time, which complicated any efforts to not only serve legal papers to him (a lawsuit for instance) but to actually enforce judgement. The Defendants never lived in the United States and have no intention of living there. For the Defendants to hire attorneys in the United States and then initiating litigation there would be tedious if not fruitless.
Court systems do not exist to be abused. However, they can be leveraged for revenge, even if not cheap revenge. Misuses of the process(es) need to be identified early on in the process and defused, for otherwise the reputation of the legal system may suffer in the public psyche. The disputes online are not a new thing and 100% of the time they involved the Claimant chasing if not stalking – morning and night every day – the Defendants, looking to entrap them by asking notoriously controversial questions – typically only to be ignored by the Defendants, who didn’t wish to be baited. The baiting was a trap from an unstable person who has long been shy when it’s pointed out he can barely keep a job – hopping from one employer to another very frequently as if there was no loyalty or social issues forced him out (being unable to get along with colleagues, whom he publicly refers to by his desire to stab them). Things such as this being publicly pointed out or discussed have resulted in the obsession growing greater and more toxic.
The pertinent claims made by the Claimant are flawed, at times utterly false, and not the first of their kind. They are not made as mere observations either; there was also provocation seeking to manifest them or evoke certain expressions. The definition of “Internet trolls” typically includes subject-changing for the purpose of seeding fuels and disputes, discord among those present. In that respect, as per the definition, some would deem the Claimant an “Internet trolls” inside the Defendants’ own Internet network. Some observers have long characterised the Claimant’s behaviour as prolonged (years-old) campaign of harassment. The Claimant can argue about the semantics, but the behaviour does merit the term. This is why the Defendants have, many times this year, considered taking legal action except informing the police and in recent months seriously sought to file counterclaim, however since the Claimant is based in the US any judgement against him on grounds of libel would likely not be enforcement due to the First Amendment and similar verdicts, such as aggravated harassment, would also be difficult to enforce, not just expensive to enforce, depending on the state. The Defendants understand that the Claimant is either barely employed, under-employed or unemployed, and therefore enforcing a judgement with a monetary award would be even more difficult. He can simply file for bankruptcy at any point, so nothing would be achieved and the Claimant can carry on harassing people online.
The complexity in the case is primarily due to the vast range of time involved and the medium of communication. The Claimant kept sending E-mails to both Defendants (since years ago; several years ago to the First Defendant and last year to the Second Defendant), but they never responded to him, ever. So what the communications boil down to are informal real-time chats in the Techrights chat network, which isn’t even the equivalent of letters, SMS etc.
The breakdown of the claims is likely the most important and relevant part of this document. First, however, some background is warranted. It will be presented as a dated timeline that should be simpler to follow than something other than chronological.
In Part 2 the style of this series will be discussed. It is a very long series, which spreads out to another case (herein and in the other counterclaims were filed). The latter case was filed because the first one was weak, so the filer spoke to someone he knew about filing a case which would target our legal budget.
The cases represent current and ongoing abuse of process by a law firm working for an American who was arrested for strangling women and another American whose own spouse calls a "rapist"; the law firm tries to engage in further process by a law to hide what it did to my wife and I for over 2 years already. We resist censorship and will illuminate documented facts. █