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VistaPrint.com Is Threatening to Sue Me Over a Blog Comment. Really???

John P.

By

It never ceases to amaze me what bad decisions some corporate executives can make. But here comes a brand new one…

Three years ago I gave VistaPrint.com a try for some cards or something. Who cares what it was… I had a bad experience. I wrote about it on my blog. End of story. Except that it wasn’t. Many other people have since chimed in on that topic, one of whom is someone by the name of “Hubbers”. He claims to have had a really bad experience and then did a whole bunch of research to suggest that VistaPrint is associated with some fairly shady dealings.

I have no idea if that is true or false, but the information certainly seems to have some validity to it. Furthermore, I spot checked some of Hubber’s claims and the information presented does appear to be fact based. But I never would have known this if I hadn’t been forced to do the research when I received the following email from VistaPrint HQ!

UPDATE: Stop the presses! VistaPrint is NOT threatening to sue me! Their Ex-partner Adaptive Affinity Ltd is!

After putting out a tweet regarding this post I was contacted by Jeff Esposito from Vistaprint who very politely informed me that his company was not the ones behind the threatening letter you will read below. After doing some research he found that VistaPrint used to partner with Adaptive Affinity to offer some subscription based services, however they ended that affiliation some time back.

Apparently some customers were inadvertently subscribing to these third party services, there was a class action lawsuit, the lawsuit was dismissed, and VistaPrint decided it was no longer in their best interests to offer these programs.

So, to summarize – Adaptive Affinity, kiss my ass. VistaPrint, we’re cool.

Website: onemansblog.com
Email:
Author: John P
Comment: Hubbers

Dear Sirs,
RE: DEFAMATION/LIBELLOUS STATEMENTS – Review: VistaPrint.com Business Cards
–

Review: VistaPrint.com Business Cards

We are writing on behalf of Adaptive Affinity Ltd and refer to the webpage listed above. This web page contains allegations regarding Adaptive Affinity and its partners that is inaccurate and defamatory in nature. It is our view the contents of this post left by ‘Hubbers’ on April 9, 2009 at 8:10 am is causing and could continue to cause serious reputational harm, not only to Adaptive Affinity but VP rewards also.

The accusations made in the post is simply untrue and no proof is offered to validate these claims.

The language used by ‘Hubbers’ is unacceptable and suggests to the ordinary user that the practices of Adaptive Affinity are unethical or at worst illegal. The entire post is an unfair attack on Adaptive Affinity and its partners. These are legitimate businesses with legitimate business practices.

Although the burden of proof lies with you to prove the truth in these statements made, as proof to you (and not for publication elsewhere) that Adaptive Affinity is a legitimate business we can confirm that less than one half a percent of the millions of consumers marketed to and the many thousands of members enrolled in Adaptive Affinity’s membership programs complain about their memberships.

Adaptive Affinity has always followed high standards of responsible corporate practice. We regularly undertake quality controls to ensure our respective business practices comply with or exceed industry standards and applicable law. These practices extend throughout the organisation. We rebut the assertions made in this article and accordingly we request that it is removed with immediate effect.

As the primary publisher and the person who exercises direct editorial control over what is published we would like to point out that you are responsible for all the posting on your site. This matter can still be resolved without incident if you act very quickly to our satisfaction now. However, if you fail to do so, we reserve all our legal rights and remedies in respect of this matter. We also reserve all our rights and remedies (in respect of all relevant posts) if you are involved with any other posts about us or if there is any other publication made as a result of your posts.

Please respond to this letter by return and in any event within 7 days of the date on which it is sent with full details of the actions and the timeframe you will be taking to urgently rectify this matter. Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.

Yours faithfully

Adaptive Affinity
Cavendish House,
369 Burnt Oak Broadway, Edgware.
HA8 5AW. United Kingdom
t: +44 (0) 8701 432 343
f: +44 (0) 8701 432 344
contact@adaptiveaffinity.com

Let’s examine this, shall we?

  1. The part that I put in bold there is fantastic. They are “reserving their rights and remedies”. Um, aren’t they always in reserve? What they mean is, “We are threatening to sue you in a court of law to force you to do what we want.”
  2. When I take a look at Hubber’s comment critically all I see is a link to a random Washington Post article, and another link to his own site where he provides what appears to be a lot of information to support his claim.
  3. I’m not here to take sides. If Hubbers was merely insulting VP without any merit, I’d delete the post, but I think that to any reasonable person this thing could go either way, so it’s not obviously defamatory (considering that truth is an absolute defense).
  4. Even if it was defamatory, who in the heck was the moron that decided the best way to approach a well known blogger was to send a threatening email? Honestly, is that supposed to scare me?

The only thing this message did was make me angry, remind me of the bad experience I had with VistaPrint, cause me to really pay attention to Hubbers comment where I hadn’t even noticed it before, and get this additional spotlight on the whole affair.

Why in the hell do people do this? And what advice would you have given them if they felt like they had a legitimate complaint to lodge?

PS – Can you believe that at the same time they sent me this letter, they left a comment on the blog trying to appear “helpful”? What is going on? Good Cop / Bad Cop?

Comments

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  3. Wow. From reading that e-mail, I can infer with confidence that the “John P” is: A) not a lawyer, and B) not literate, either.

    First of all, what kind of lawyer asserts that the allegations were unlawful IN THEIR OPINION, as if their personal perspective–rather than the letter of the law–formed the basis for a legitimate case against the author!?!

    “IT IS OUR VIEW the [sic] contents of this post . . . is causing [sic] and could [could?] continue to cause serious reputational harm…” (“reputational”?)

    What’s more, Mr. P couldn’t even be troubled to confirm that he and the blogger are even subject to the same laws! Libel cases are much easier to win in the UK than in the US, where the burden is on the PLAINTIFF to prove that the allegations are untrue! What a maroon:

    “Although the burden of proof lies with you to prove the truth in these statements…” (Uhhh…nope, it does not. Not in America.)

    …And here, a few other bon mots demonstrate that the author’s grasp of English is as feeble as his legal case:

    “contains allegations . . . that is”
    “The accusations . . . is”
    “It is our view the contents . . . is causing”
    “…we request that it [the assertions] is removed with immediate effect.”

    What a maroon.

  4. So Vistaprint was able to reap the monetary benefits from affinity, use the stolen cash to grow their foreign business, bombard us with advertising, and then drop them like a hot potato as if they were innocent? Hmmm

  5. Hi!
    All, Was looking for a template letter to send to some forum owners and found this site.
    Dont know anything about that other company, but I did use Vista print, First time order never showed up, they did issue a refund upon contacting them.
    Was kinda wondering if I should use them again or not, but did so, 2nd time items arrived (late one day) but all was good, 3rd time same thing item arrived in good order and I was very happy with the items.
    maybe they need a little better customer service, but they deliver the goods, so I dont think it is fair to call it a scam.
    In any business you have happy customers and unhappy ones, we just need to remember to be fair, I was upset the first time, but after the refund arrived in less than 24hours, couldnt say a bad thing about them as items DO get lost in the mail.
    Anyway just thought to share.
    Cheers!

  6. I just found charges on my credit card from Vistaprint by way of BusinessMax, which started in November of 2009, and have continued, unbeknownst to me (uh, I didn’t watch carefully enough, yes) to this day. So, Vistaprint has not cleaned up it’s act. I am wiser now, though chagrined at my lack of vigilance in the marketplace and my bank statements. Sigh.

    • Don’t worry. Those guys can kiss my ass. I live in the USA and the constitution guarantees our freedom of speech. If those bastards sue me in a US court of law I will not take it lying down.

      Attorneys who participate in the filing or maintenance of litigation without probable cause are personally liable for malicious prosecution of a civil action. And given there is no merit to their claims surrounding this post they would be ill advised to proceed.

      As you previously noted, there has been a lot of successful legal activity in the US against Adaptive Affinity, not to mention the fact that I’ve said absolutely nothing wrong here.

      Cheers,

      John P.

  10. This is something which has shaken me. I did not really understand the impact of leaving acomment on one’s own blog regarding an experience we have had.
    Recently I made a similarcomment but it was for some eBook. Can they really sue us? I mean we have the right to FREE opinion right?
    Am concerned …

    • Latha this article covers the legal details of what is being discussed here. In effect these companies are using Libel or Defamation Laws against bloggers.

      http://www.expertlaw.com/library/personal_injury/defamation.html

      Typically, the elements of a cause of action for defamation include:

      1. A false and defamatory statement concerning another;
      2. The unprivileged publication of the statement to a third party (that is, somebody other than the person defamed by the statement);
      3. If the defamatory matter is of public concern, fault amounting at least to negligence on the part of the publisher; and
      4. Damage to the plaintiff.

      and if “per se” defamation is recognized,

      1. Attacks on a person’s professional character or standing;
      2. Allegations that an unmarried person is unchaste;
      3. Allegations that a person is infected with a sexually transmitted disease;
      4. Allegations that the person has committed a crime of moral turpitude;

  11. By the way, Vistaprint has a live person on Twitter every day (@Vistaprint) to respond to issues, and I know that the person handling that is able to get at least some things done – after I complained about the (small) deluge of multiple promotional emails coming in every week they added an option on their website accounts page to control how often you get their promotional mailings.

  12. This appears to be from Adaptive Affinity, not from Vistaprint.

    I did a little digging and didn’t see anything that indicated that the two companies were related; in fact Adaptive Affinity (and other names) are apparently owned by Vertrue, and based on the Wikipedia articles for the two companies they are unrelated and Vistaprint terminated the marketing relationship in late 2009 (verified by looking at their financial news releases from their investor page).

    It’s possible that Vistaprint is still doing a rewards program of their own (it’s included in their Customer Service questions & I haven’t done a test order to see if I’m asked about one), but based on their 11/30/2009 press release they were planning on eliminating all rewards programs by the end of 2009 – “effective as of November 23, 2009, no membership rewards or similar programs have been or will be available to any Vistaprint customers.”

    Basically, this looks to me like Vistaprint got involved with an affiliate marketing program, killed it off some time ago (because of the bad feelings it was generating?) and is likely going to be feeling the aftermath for some time. I was concerned about this and did a little digging because I actually link to their website as part of the Google affiliate program (though none of the less-than-10 clickthroughs actually ordered). I’ve ordered from them with no problems, but I also deal with Godaddy so I’m used to making sure that I always pick “No Thanks” to affiliate marketing and upsells.

  14. @Reputation Management— I love it!! Really sick of bullies, and big companies taking advantage of default judgments just makes me ill. The reason I read this article was because of another blogger blogging about it, and now I’m going to blog about it…. do the math, Vistaprint!

  15. I received an almost identical email over a post made by one of the bloggers I host (I run a small hosting/development company). Fortunately (as per my understanding), 230 states that I am not liable as I have no editorial input on the blog. Adaptive Affinity is not winning any friends.

  16. Dear Vista Print Executives….

    1.) Marketing people are cheaper that legal people.

    2.) Marketing people have a keen sense of building your brand, while lawyers have a keen sense of whipping out the sword to defend it.

    I can understand why you might be upset that your a bad customer experience has resulted in lost business.

    I can understand that someone told you that a take down letter might encourage bloggers to back down and when searching for “vistaprint reviews” on Google the elimination of these posts would boost your sales.

    Whoever told this to you forgot about a few key facts……

    * Great customer service is about passion. – I bet that if you would have reached out to John P. and made amends, he would have written glorious things about you. Hell you could have sent him a gift certificate for 10% the cost of what you paid your advisors and legal team.

    * Picking on Bloggers will result in a lot of bad publicity for you. 10,000 people just read this post and another 100,000 will read it in the near future.

    * People don’t like bullies.

    If I were the CEO of VistaPrint, I would hop on a plane, come to Dallas, take John P. out for dinner, discuss customer service, get some advice from him, print him a couple hundred thousand business cards, make a public apology and work to earn the respect of the community. I bet Tony from Zappos would do it!

  17. Love their comment on the original post; “We remain in easy reach of our members and encourage feedback on our services”.

  18. My sympathies, John. I got sued for $1 million last year by a disgruntled “media psychologist” who didn’t like what some commenters wrote about her on my blog. When she learned that she couldn’t hold me liable for their comments under Section 230, she tried to sue me for what I had written. With the help of some terrific lawyers that the Electronic Frontier Foundation helped me find, I fought back on both coasts. The lawsuit, which never should have been filed in the first place, went away. But as Mark notes, we shouldn’t have to incur any expense or stress from these lawsuits.

    More to the point, I suspect that adaptive Affinity is about to learn about the power of the Streisand Effect.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out what to do about the two (2) lawsuit threats that came in this weekend based on my blogs reporting someone’s arrest and conviction. She seems to think that I violated her copyright by using her name in reporting her arrest and conviction. Uh huh.

  20. So your blog is covered as a business asset of an LLC you have? That’s smart, as if we didn’t already know. Like you said, the truth is definitely an “absolute defense.” I’ve never ordered from VistaPrint.com, and I won’t ever now. Why don’t online businesses just do their customers right, and man up and when they’re wrong. I guess it’s the collective corporate Borg mentality. Good luck!

  21. Hey, I’ve posted an excerpt of this to my blog with a link.

    “PS – Can you believe that at the same time they sent me this letter, they left a comment on the blog trying to appear “helpful”? What is going on? Good Cop / Bad Cop?”

    I don’t thing they expected you to post their letter on Ur blog. We have all seen this type of behavior before.. If anyone here reads wikileaks.org you are sure to have a good knowledge of the types of tactics these companies will undertake to scare you into submission.

    if you haven’t already you should submit these letters and comments there.

    all the best

    Frank.

  22. Hey john I wish you all the best with what ever happens, you are certainly a brave man. If I got an email like that it certainly would scare the crap out of me. Just yesterday i had a bad experience with a major company on the web and I said a few things on my identica site. it makes me wonder if i will have any trouble from it now. I hope it just goes away.

  24. There are lots of resources out there and I decided long ago that I prefer to send the entire card of artwork with orders for my clients rather than use the templates. At least if you send the art for the entire card and the colors are set the same in the file, they’ll all be the wrong shade, not parts. :-) Maybe the templates are pre-printed and they’re just printing the personalization on top but I wouldn’t think so. Anything is possible.

    The spammy nature of the emails after you place an order is something I don’t like. That’s why I have an old, old email address where I send potential spammers….anyone I don’t trust gets that email address. PS Really enjoyed OpenCamp!

  25. John,

    If you need some help with this, let me know. I can do a little bit of research if you want.

    The Communications Decency Act in the U.S. should protect you here. However, I am a bit worried since this is a British company and I am less familiar with their libel laws. Also, libel tourism is becoming much more common these days, take a look at what happened to Bruce Everiss when he took on Evony, a UK blogger was sued by a Chinsese company in New Zealand of all places.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/31/evony-libel-case-bruce-everiss

    They ended up dropping the case but it was a major headache for him.

    Drop me a line if you want to talk about this or give me a call, you should have my number.

    Keep me posted!

    • Hi yes Adaptve Affinity is British Company but belongs to your one cald Vertrue Incorporated wich was found guilty of defrauding nearly 500 000 costomers in Iowa. They use seling action cald bait-and-switch wich is form of fraud , in England and Walseit is banned unther the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulation 2008. Breaking this law can result in a criminal prosecution, and unlimited fine and two years in jail. Uswell uk conterpart has been investigated by the The Office of Fair Trading (2009) and the Trading Standards Institute (2008). I was victim of one of this company shames my bank is now in dispiute with this company for robing me of my maney. when we whant to bring this company down this looks like we need all work togever.

  26. My experience with overzealous legal types sending letters like that is that showing a strong backbone and using a solid spine is the best way to approach intimidation tactics like that. After all, they certainly wouldn’t want anything to propagate any further on the internet and put an even bigger spotlight on the links that the one user posted to your comments.

    Like cockroaches, legal types like this tend to scatter in all directions when the lights suddenly go on.

  27. John, Interesting story and one that seems to be occurring more and more all the time. I think the fact of the matter is that companies are downright afraid of the voice of bloggers and how quickly word can travel through social media channels.

    This kind of tactic might work on new or less experienced bloggers but companies should be at least smart enough to do a little research on who they are attacking. More established bloggers have a tendency to know their rights and aren’t as easily bullied.

    Fight the good fight.

  28. Vistaprint.com would make better use of their time addressing the 18,700 search results on Google that show up under ‘Vistaprint.com scam’

    http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q=vistaprint.com+scam&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&ech=1&psi=O2aCTJ2mFsGblgffkd2IDg12836143220988&emsg=NCSR&ei=EWiCTKnWKIWKlwfdxNnDDw

    Their threat of a frivolous lawsuit only brings more attention to what kind of a company Vistaprint.com really is.

    Also see: Consumer complaints about VistaPrint.com
    at http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/vistaprint.html

  29. Ridiculous, I was not even aware about Vista prints doing such things, and I was just about to order a bunch of business cards from them.

    Now no way.

  30. It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch lawyers can be sometimes. It’s like having the legal right to do something automatically makes it a wise thing to do. Dumb.

    My guess is their legal and marketing departments don’t know what the other is doing. Regardless I fear we’re going to see more companies with deep pockets legally bullying bloggers moving forward.

    We desperately need tort reform in the US!

  31. What’s even more insane about this is Google Ads showed me a Vista Print ad when I came to read this article.

  33. John,

    I have been there, and it doesn’t get better from here.

    I was sued for $100,000 by a hosting company where I was a customer. I had a bad experience, I blogged about it, and I was sued for defamation and libel. The suit was thrown out of court, but it still cost me a few thousand dollars to get legal representation. Had I ignored the suit and not gotten representation, Texas law would have a allowed the hosting company to have gotten a default judgement of $100,000 against me.

    After I was served, I found out that suing former customers and employees was how the company operated, and they had thousands of dollars of “assets” on the books solely from default judgements – it made their balance sheet look good, but their reputation was in the toilet.

    Frivolous lawsuits are a huge problem with our legal system – anyone can sue anyone over anything – it’s ridiculous. And the people that get hurt the worst are the ones who don’t have the financial resources to defend themselves. It’s shameful. And from the bloggers perspective, it IMHO appears to be infringing on our freedoms.

    Some companies stay in the black simply by suing people – they don’t care about reputation. And bloggers can get hit hard with legal fees from these frivolous lawsuits.

    I have been wanting some type of “bloggers insurance” that would protect bloggers from frivolous lawsuits, but I have not found such a policy. If you ever find a way to protect yourself legally, I would love to know how you do it.

    Don’t try to make sense of this – that’s a waste of time. It better to focus on how to protect yourself from future and pending lawsuits.

    Regards,
    Mark Leon Watson

    Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

    • Mark,

      There are three very simple things that can be done to protect yourself (at least in the USA).

      1. First, set up a simple LLC to “own” your online property. This provides a layer of protection against claims which would threaten your personal property in case you actually did something to deserve to be sued. They can take your LLC’s assets, but not your personal assets.
      2. Obtain a Personal Liability Protection policy from a reputable insurance provider. They are relatively inexpensive and will cover you in cases where you are sued. They pay your legal fees, etc. which is all you really need in order to fight back and countersue, etc.
      3. Make sure that you stick to the facts when reporting things like this. Truth is an absolute defense, and if you are wrongfully sued you have recourse.

      Yes, there are companies who choose to sue for the wrong reasons, and it’s unfortunate when that happens. In this case, they picked the wrong guy if they think they can bully me.

      Cheers,

      John P.