Sue Your Way to Popularity

If you have been following the recent unpleasantness (no, not the last Canadian election, though you would be right to call it that), you'll know that Warren Kinsella has been threatening legal action against certain bloggers. One of those victims of legal intimidation tactics, Damian Brooks, is one of the Red Ensign bloggers. He posted a blog entry which was quite outspoken and Kinsella took offence.

Rather than doing what most bloggers would do (and Kinsella has his own blog, to which I'm carefully not linking), retaliate in your own blog to the perceived attack, Kinsella chose to brandish his weapons of mass (legal) destruction. Damian, being a wise chap in spite of his perhaps over-enthusiastic original posting, realized that even if he won a court case, the costs would be ruinous. He removed the posting from his blog.

I know about as much about the law as a pig knows about music, so it's not particularly useful for me to comment on the legal aspects of the case, but it did strike me as odd that Kinsella immediately reached for the biggest stick in his arsenal. This post at Samizdata suggests the real reason for his actions:

By the sound of it, there is very little that the blogosphere can do to make this Warren Kinsella person think better of his threats, although I would love to be proved wrong about that. Even by the standards of regular party politicians, he sounds like a fairly unpleasant character. All bloggers can do is publicise that he has made the threats, which I think he will be very happy about. He may be nasty but he is not stupid. He wants to be known as a political bully, if only to sell his book about how to be a political bully.

Exactly.

Update: Free Will has a good roundup of the situation. Hat tip to Jon