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If you are reading this, most likely someone has posted something on CallFerret that you just don't like at all. This page serves to help explain our Terms of Service in plain english as well as to inform you of your legal rights.

You would be best served to read through the whole page from beginning to end, but feel free to skip ahead if you just can't get the thought of suing someone out of your head.

1. Preface
2. CallFerret's Comment Removal Policy; better known as 'Why we don't delete comments!'
3. What About My Privacy! or 'Remove my private information!'
4. The Law and You - Communications Decency Act of 1996
5. All right, I understand, but what CAN I do?
6. OK, but I still want to sue someone

Preface

Due to the nature of CallFerret's content, we regularly receive various communications from people with claims of illegal, false, defamatory or otherwise incorrect information in a posted comment. In an effort to help people understand the responsibilities of CallFerret, the original poster and the legal rights and options of the complainant, this page serves as our standard response to all of these related issues.

Due to the nature of the law (explained below), CallFerret has no legal obligation (read zero, none, zilch) to moderate, censor or delete any posted content, therefore threats and intimidation will have absolutely no effect (actually not true...some of these letters make our day).

CallFerret's Comment Removal Policy

We have a very simple policy on comment removal with a very simple explanation: We never delete posted comments.

CallFerret serves as a clearing house of information about telemarketing companies, debt collectors, market research firms and other phone-based agencies. In order for our site visitors to have the complete perspective on a company or individual, both positive and negative comments need to stay published - complete and unaltered. If companies felt that they could intimidate either this site or the posters of comments, the validity and usefulness of our content would cease. By choosing to never, ever, delete comments, we remove the incentive for companies to attempt to pressure comment posters (and the site) in an attempt to improve their public relations and image. Therefore, regardless of any purported inaccuracy of a posted comment, CallFerret refuses all requests for comment removal / modification.

While this policy may allow questionable comments or information to remain in place, we believe the overall credibility that this policy enables is more important.

Also, though the bulk of content submitted by our users is about companies that make outbound phone calls, this site is organized around phone numbers and may also contain user submitted information, positive or negative, about other companies and individuals. While this does not change our comment removal policy or the applicability of the law (see below), we encourage you to continue reading as to how you can respond with a rebuttal and further defend yourself under the law.

Explained another way...imagine if in the course of a lawsuit between two parties, one of them makes repeated false, defamatory or outrageous statements against the other. Regardless of who wins this court case, all of that information becomes part of the public record forever. Even if you win a court case or receive a judgment in your favor, every negative thing they say in the course of the trial will live on in the public court record; no judgment or award that you are entitled to will change this fact.

All visitors to CallFerret implicitly agree to our Terms of Service by usage of the site and through the posting of comments. These Terms forbid the posting of, among other things, false, illegal, defamatory, or personally identifying information or any information that the poster knows to be false. These posts expose the poster not only to civil remedies due to CallFerret but also the subject of their posts. While we will not remove any comments, if you feel that you are the subject of this kind of post, your options are outlined further below.

* Per our Terms of Service, we reserve the right to edit or delete comment spam in order to remove the incentive from marketers and those individuals wishing to promote their personal/business agenda through the posting of external links and/or spam on our site.

What About My Privacy!

Telephone numbers in and of themselves are not private information. In most cases, neither is the name and address of the person that the number belongs to. No further evidence is needed that this is the case than the many companies that sell commercial databases or reverse lookup products/websites that often provide significantly more information on individuals than anything on CallFerret.

Our list of phone numbers is generated by the searches and postings of our site visitors. CallFerret itself does not knowingly post the personal contact information of individuals in our company profiles. Any third-party posted comments that contain this kind of information are addressed under our Comment Removal Policy and the Communications Decency Act (explained further below).

The Law and You - Communications Decency Act of 1996

Our resistance to threats and intimidation as well as the highly unlikely, nigh impossibility, of a website like CallFerret losing a lawsuit based on the comments of its users is based completely in United States Federal Law and subsequently supported in numerous court cases. This law is The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), 47 U.S.C. § 230 (WikiPedia and Cornell Law).

Per the CDA, a website such as CallFerret cannot, in most cases, be held legally responsible for content posted by a third-party, i.e. a site visitor in a comment. 47 U.S.C § 230(c)(1) states, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Since the comments on CallFerret are authored by our site visitors, the law says that CallFerret cannot be legally regarded as the "publisher or speaker" of those comments. If CallFerret is not considered the legal "publisher or speaker" of these comments, we cannot be held legally liable for said comments even if they contain false, inaccurate or otherwise objectionable material.

The government's intent in this is simple. For the Internet economy to flourish and in the interests of free speech on the Internet, websites should not be held liable for content they don't actually write. Due to the volume of information submitted by users to large sites like CallFerret, it cannot possibly be monitored and checked for accuracy. If the law required this kind of activity, Internet surfers would find themselves no longer able to use their favorite forums, post opinions on products at Amazon.com or comment on their friends' MySpace and Facebook pages for publisher fear of legal action.

Batzel v. Smith, 333 F.3d 1018, 1027-28 (9th Cir. 2003) recognized that "Making interactive computer services and their users liable for the speech of third parties would severely restrict the information available on the Internet. Section 230 [of the CDA] therefore sought to prevent lawsuits from shutting down websites and other services on the Internet."

Further consideration of the CDA by lower courts have upheld this view that websites like CallFerret are immune from virtually every type of civil liability when the site has been sued based on information posted by a third party. See Doe v. America Online, Inc., 783 So.2d 1010 (Fl. 2001); Green v. America Online, 318 F.3d 465, 470 (3rd Cir. 2003) (noting that the CDA, "‘precludes courts from entertaining claims that would place a computer service provider in a publisher's role,' and therefore bars ‘lawsuits seeking to hold a service provider liable for its exercise of a publisher's traditional editorial functions - such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone, or alter content.'"); Carafano v. Metrosplash.com, Inc., 339 F.3d 1119 (9th Cir. 2003); Schneider v. Amazon.com, Inc., 31 P.3d 37 (Wash.App. 2001); Doe v. GTE Corp., 347 F.3d 655 (7th Cir. 2003); Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997); Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp. 44 (D. D.C. 1998).

So, in case the point of all that is still unclear, this is why you should care about the CDA and CallFerret. Regardless of the content that someone posts on CallFerret, the CDA does not allow you to hold CallFerret liable for third-party comments. Suing CallFerret will cost you money and you will lose. In fact, it is likely that the judge may even grant summary judgment in our favor without even pursuing a full trial, simply because the CDA is crystal clear in its protection of websites concerning third-party content.

All right, I understand, but what CAN I do?

The best thing to do if someone has posted inaccurate information about you or your company is to simply post a rebuttal. Consumers don't expect companies to never receive a complaint. However, how a company deals with complaints often says a great deal about the company and the validity of those complaints. If you did everything possible for that customer, say so in detail. If their comment is inaccurate or false, state your reasons why you believe it to be so. Calmly and clearly explaining your perspective, your side of the story, will go a long way in discrediting the occasional negative comment about you.

If you are not a company, we still feel that the best solution is to post a thorough and polite rebuttal. If the posted comment does not pertain to a business transaction between two parties or if in any other way you are unsatisfied with this option, continue reading below on how you may legally pursue the poster of the comment. CallFerret is glad to comply with law enforcement and the courts in helping you pursue someone who has violated your rights or our Terms of Service within the context of our responsibilities outlined in our Privacy Policy and under the CDA.

OK, but I still want to sue someone

If someone has violated your rights in a post on CallFerret, they may be personally liable. Our Terms and Privacy Policies as well as all applicable laws require us to protect the privacy of our visitors. Therefore, we can only release any personally identifying information that we may have about a comment poster through a lawful court order. Again, this is to prevent threats and intimidation against the CallFerret community. If a court does not see a valid, legal reason to demand access to this information, we will not release it.

Some lawyers who have received their legal education through mail-order and other various individuals who refuse to accept the validity of Federal Law as it pertains to CallFerret and the CDA may still wish to sue CallFerret. Harassing CallFerret in this manner will fail for two specific reasons.

The first is that Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (as well as each state's specific rules), generally requires that all pleadings, including initial Complaints, must be presented in good faith, after a reasonable investigation into the facts and the law and not made for an improper purpose such as harassment. Specifically, "By presenting to the court a pleading, written motion, or other paper — whether by signing, filing, submitting, or later advocating it — an attorney or unrepresented party certifies that to the best of the person's knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances:"

1. it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation;
2. the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law;
3. the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and
4. the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on belief or a lack of information.

Citations: WikiPedia and Cornell Law

This means that if you attempt to sue CallFerret for content submitted by a third-party, it is highly likely that the judge will find the lawsuit was submitted without "probable cause" and/or is a "frivolous lawsuit." In either case, you and your lawyer may likely be subject to sanctions by the judge as well as civil liability for "wrongful use of civil proceedings."

Therein lies the second reason you should not attempt to harass CallFerret through lawsuits. Should you file against CallFerret, CallFerret will not stipulate to a dismissal of the case without full payment of all related attorney fees and expenses. All frivolous lawsuits filed against CallFerret will be aggressively pursued for both compensatory and punitive damages.

Credit is due towards the inspiration and source for this page as well as one of the pioneers in online consumer advocacy: RipOffReport.com. You can read much more about the CDA as well as the great service they provide through their Reports.

This document, as well as all other information that you read on CallFerret, is not intended to constitute legal advice. Please consult an attorney should you need to further clarify your rights and options concerning anyone who is posting information relating to you on the Internet. This document serves to further explain our perspective. It should not be considered in any way to alter or restrict our terms of service, which in all cases supersedes any other document on CallFerret in outlining our terms of use.