If this is some kind of performance art, I’m starting to tire of it. I got home from work today and read my emails. A reader had emailed me this photo. I’m speechless. Whoever created it is, I allege, guilty of fraud and libel. I published no such statement, and anyone who has been following the Stencil cafe PR debacle would know this.
Courtesy of a reader / copyright: used under the fair dealings provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 / c2012
Fitzroyalty receives thousands of pageviews a day, whereas a poster will be seen by far fewer people. If viewers of the poster are not familiar with Fitzroyalty, this poster is meaningless and, if they are, few are likely to believe it or care much about it even if they do.
Fitzroyalty has no business model and earns no income, so hypothesising about suing for defamation is pointless as I cannot demonstrate tangible losses. If any loss of reputation or esteem comes from this poster, it will be miniscule and intangible.
Furthermore, while it’s highly likely the poster was created by the proprietors of the cafe, I cannot easily prove this to be true. So I wouldn’t know, with the necessary conviction, who to sue.
Suing for defamation because of trivial offences tends to backfire badly for the belligerently litigious, as Melinda Tankard Reist has recently discovered. I see no point in responding to it, but I will write about. It’s fundamentally dishonest. Creating it is a malicious and unethical act that is potentially also a criminal act.
