terminator007 said:
Websites are going down like flies all over the country at the moment it seems because of bloody legal action, why can't everyone stop feeding the lawyers and just wear any accusations they cop, its got well and truly beyond a joke!
I think everyone is over reacting, but the clubs do have to look after the finances of the team, and I'm sure that no club can afford to be sued over something as trivial as a post by a fan on a website.
Having said that, the chance would have to be one in a million. These posts are read by maybe 100 people, tops, so any damage to reputation would have to be bordering on zero, so why would you spend 100k or so on bringing a legal action to win maybe $5 damages - it doesn't make any sense.
There must be millions of message boards around the world, and some of them, like political ones, would become very heated, so RL message boards must be close to the lowest risk for libel, or not far off the lowest risk. Maybe knitting groups might be more polite. If you want to see guys go for each other, check out some of the pommy soccer sites, nothing but semi-literate abuse from wall to wall.
This site is run by a bunch of average guys with very little money behind them, so sueing them would be pointless even if you could prove something, because all you would get is the satisfaction of winning the case and a fat lawyers bill, but sueing a club could be a different matter i suppose, even though i still think it would be very hard to prove damage to reputation when very few read the posts, and even less believe them.
