Jammed in the SPAM files of my email box when I got home was this great little email, which I retrieved, that was sent via this here website:

Slanderous Statements wrote:
Here are two court definitions you need to understand of which are currently displayed on this website:

LIBEL: Libel is a published or fixed form of defamation of character; a civil wrong that falsely impugns the reputation or character of a person or entity, opening the target up to public scorn or ridicule. Online libel, or cyberlibel takes electronic forms such as email, mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, podcasts, vodcasts and WEB PAGES.

DEFAMATION OF CHARACTER: Defamation of Character is often used to describe accusations of slander, libel or both. Slander involves verbal derogatory statements, while libel involves written ones. In a court of law, the plaintiff pursuing the lawsuit would charge defamation of character to cover any form of false or damaging allegations.

—

Thus, please amend your accusations accordingly.

No real email address was provided. It said “noneofyourbusiness@noneofyourbusiness.com.” It wasn’t tagged to any particular post.

I had to laugh that I was being asked to amend something with being told what it was I was meant to amend. Seems like if you go to that bother, you’d want to be specific and sure. Otherwise, I might figure it’s Paul Wolfowitz mad at me for showing bad pictures of him and his gal.

What the email did have, and what everyone who manages a website knows about, is an IP address.

Here’s a little bit of an Internet tip for you kids out there. If you are going to send a cowardly email implying wrongdoing, um, don’t use your fucking work computer. Especially, if your work is a Silicon Valley company in the neighborhood, which has not just an identifiable address, but shows on my website stats with its own browser on its own operating system. It’s a well-branded, but unique, computer company.

Checking the trail of what the person was viewing on this website to get his panties wadded up, which resolved back to a Google search of a particular name, the name jumped right out of the data — Good Old Nick. Probably not a coincidence, his son works at the company whose IP address left a trail.

I’ve updated the old website to remove Nick’s distinctive last name. What the hell, I figure. Whilst I’m going to be engaging in a small claims court hearing, might as well keep the profile lower. Court records will weed us all out eventually.

For the helpful definitions contained in the email, though, they aren’t entirely accurate in terms of legal precedents so far in folks spouting shit on the internet. One key fact is contained in those paragraphs that is indeed important is the word FALSELY.

What I have mentioned so far is FACT. We did not trash the apartment. The apartment we moved into was NOT professionally cleaned or maintained, and we left it in the state we found it. Nick did invade our privacy, and perhaps quite legally and factually, trespassed. He also removed our belongings without our permission.

His “invoice” to us requesting money OVER and ABOVE the security deposit was improperly documented per California State law. It also falsely claimed damage that never occurred (or if it did somehow, not by us and not when we lived in his property).

Conversely, our letter to him was written appropriately under state law and was documented properly. It was also ignored by good, old Nick.

We have spoken about our tenant/landlord dispute to a lawyer in an unofficial capacity, several other tenants and another landlord, and we asked them to review our documents. In all conversations, we have been encouraged to proceed in small claims court, because we can well document our good faith actions as tenants and demonstrate that we merit the money owed to us.

None of the above statements are libelous, since they are true, factual and without malice. (Although, there is all sorts of dumbassery and hyperbole on my part.) We are involved in a dispute where one side has documented adherence to and an understanding of the laws governing our tenancy and one side has not.

When we win in small claims court, I will link to whatever public websites there are that indicate how we were treated unfairly in this particular business relationship. Further, it is through the same web and public records that I was able to discover that we are not at all the first tenants to have a dispute with this landlord.

If the writer of the email sees this post, he may also want to do a more thorough search of libel law and the whole net thing. More than a few reputable sites point to a change in the world, such as this quote from Forbes.com: “What the Internet may do is make the whole idea of libel law seem old, says Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University. Moglen argues that the idea of libel law is archaic and based on the “village complaint,” where intimations about one’s chastity or morality could be devastating.”

One common thread is that the unique nature of the internet allows people to talk back. If you don’t like what I’m saying AND CAN PROVE ME WRONG, have at it. I’m supplying the bandwidth.

Reply anyway, because at least dialogue, even if it’s to call me a horse’s ass is really what I had hoped for when we moved. What we got was incoherent ranting and unprofessionalism.

And, I’m minding my p’s and q’s thanks to the good folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.