Who Has the Last Word in Consumer Debate?

In March, I wrote about a local home improvement contractor who was suing two of his customers for posting negative comments online about his work.

"Awful" is how Mount Pleasant's Monica Hammock described her experience with SCS Contracting Group of Burtonsville.

"Libel" is how SCS's owner, Stephen C. Sieber, described the comments Hammock and others posted on Angie's List, a consumer Web site.

Now Sieber has a bigger target. In April, the contractor withdrew the libel lawsuits against his customers and filed a suit against Angie's List, charging it with tortious interference and fraud.

You can read the lawsuit yourself at http://www.angiegotsued.com, a site Sieber put up. Basically, Sieber's argument is that Angie's List trumped up the accusations against his company as a way of luring new customers.

Angie's List members pay about $60 a year to be able to search reviews of various service providers and post comments on their own consumer experiences. The for-profit company has about 500,000 members across the country.

Sieber is especially incensed about a "Consumer Alert" Angie's List e-mailed in February, warning that several of its members had complained about SCS and said they were harassed by Sieber. The alert found its way onto various neighborhood message groups.

The alert, Sieber wrote in his lawsuit, "was used solely as a public relations ploy to gain more market exposure and revenue for Defendants, at the expense of the business and reputation of SCS Contracting Group and Stephen C. Sieber personally."

In an interview, Sieber told me: "I'm standing up for all the service providers who this will not happen to, ever."

Angie Hicks, the founder of Indianapolis-based Angie's List, said: "The First Amendment is a powerful thing. We strongly believe that we are on solid legal footing in this situation, and we're going to vigorously defend ourselves against this suit."

This could turn into a massive case of he said/they said. Meanwhile, I'm left with a few observations: