OzBargain has just received its very first legal threat! This is what happened.

Yesterday (23 April) at around mid-day I received an email from a “Senior Project Administrator” of a construction company (that shall remain nameless for now). The subject says “Your posters on our <construction site>” (somewhere in Sydney CBD). To paraphrase the email and turn it to point form:

• “your company” has placed “your poster” on “our construction hoarding” without authority.
• “your company” has discarded “our notice” of unauthorised usage, and is subjected to prosecution.
• “your company” needs to remove the posters immediately by the end of business day today.
• failing to do so, “this company” will take action to prosecute “your company” for all the cost and damages, plus recovering the legal cost.

Wow wow wow. Wait a minute — what’s that “your company” and “this company” and “your poster” — I am actually quoting literally from the email. I have no idea who the sender was, nor what the offence was. I presume “your company” is OzBargain here as that’s where I received the email, but has anyone seen the OzBargain poster around?! Anyone?! I am so cheap and I won’t even spend a cent on advertisement these days and someone is accusing me for pasting posters all over their construction site?

So I replied him an email basically saying “WTF?” but in a much nicer tone. I then grabbed his IP address from his email header, and scanned through the web server log searching for hints. It turns out that 20 minutes prior to sending me the email, he searched for the term rockstargames.com on Google Australia, and OzBargain came up at #3 on the result page! He clicked through, browsed to the About page, then the Contact page and finally fired me that threatening email (obviously he did not read our about page).

Worse, the day before from the same office IP address, another colleague of his came to OzBargain searching for Dell coupons (probably a senior colleague as this guy used Windows XP whereas the first guy used Windows 2000). Please guys! Tell your colleagues about OzBargain and they will definitely thank you for it. Not only will they find the latest sales, promotions and coupon codes here, they will also not embarrass themselves thinking OzBargain is actually an authorised representative for so and so companies (I have personally replied 20+ emails this week from those who thought OzBargain is Everyday Rewards, argh!!!).

Anyway. The same guy wrote back 5:15pm yesterday (still thinking I was from RockstarGames.com), asking me to “get on with those posters” + provide proofs that I will refrain from doing the same in the future. He then attached a few photos, which proved to be extremely helpful resolving this false accusation.

The construction site is actually just 100 metres from my office so I could have gone and checked out myself. However what has happened is now pretty obvious. Someone — presumably GTA4’s Australian distributor or some local game retailer — has pasted their posters all over constructions sites in Sydney CBD. Another person, who saw the web site adress “rockstargames.com” on the poster, googled it, landed on OzBargain, and then threatened me with suit.

So I replied back with “YOU ARE AN IDIOT”, explaining what OzBargain is, how he came across OzBargain, and declared absolutely no affiliation with the said game developers.

Now, anyone knows who is the distributor for GTA4 in Australia? Anyone knows who has been putting up posters of GTA4 in Sydney? Anyone wants to help out that poor guy from the construction company?