Friday, January 8, 2010

How to Get Sued

Want to be sued or get multiple threats of lawsuits? It's easy! Just operate a non-profit organization and their website. That's all that's required!

Yep, you too can be sued by anyone and everyone for whatever you're doing to help in a charitable fashion. If they don't like what you've posted on your site, they'll threaten to sue. If they don't like how you named them (for what they are) on your site, they'll sue. If you ask to take money to help you with something regarding your charity and they see it as a solicitation (even though all you did was post it on your site)... yep, they'll sue!

In short, if you want to be sued, just organize a 501(3)(c) and, if you can get through the IRS' hurdles to become a non-profit charity, you too can be sued by everyone else who thinks you're worthy of lawsuit!

Why? Because nobody likes charity that isn't government-enforced theft. You know, like the IRS or the publik skewl. If you're a private charity, you're fair game. Don't worry about what their reasoning might be, they'll come up with one.

As you all know, I'm part of a local animal rescue group and today, we received no less than two threats of lawsuit from two seaprate entities over two different things on our website. I'm not going to point to specifics or even our site itself, just to say that:

1) the first threat is from an obviously mentally-deranged woman who needs some serious help and a JOB.

2) the other threat is because someone didn't like us calling them what they are and made a deal with a third party involved in the whole shebang that we weren't informed of.

So the first was responded to by yours truly with an "FU lady" and the second was responded to with a removal of the "offense" from our website.

Now, of course, someone apparently called the IRS to attempt to threaten our charitable status and they gave us a friendly phone call to ask us to change some wording on one page that might be construed as "political in nature."

Probably where I said complying with IRS rules is a PIA. So I'll fix that now, after I finish ranting here.


--Read more coherent stuff from Aaron by visiting his main blog at Aaron's EnvironMental Corner - where the environment is looked at mentally. Or something like that. Or just Twitter: Tweet Me