Summer is ending and in Vancouver it feels like summer stopped yesterday with the first cool, rainy day of the season. Many welcome the end of summer and the coming of long-needed rain. I like it hot. When the summer stops abruptly, I grieve just a little. But I understand how people feel. Sometimes you just want it to stop. This week we are stopping our summer review of weird and wacky food-law stories and looking at cases where people just want it to stop.
Please stop defaming!
Our first case comes from right here in BC and it shows why, legally speaking, it’s a very bad thing to speak badly about your business competitors. If you diss the competition, it will usually backfire in ways you didn’t anticipate.
In 2012, VTS, a BC traffic control services company, was bidding for a lucrative BC Hydro contract alongside a competitor, the Ansan Group. Turmoil arose when a defamatory article was published, alleging corruption, bribery, and other misdeeds linked to Malak, owner of the Ansan.

While the origin of the article was initially veiled in anonymity, subsequent court findings identified the author as Remon Hanna, a former employee of Ansan who had later aligned with VTS. It was clear that there was a smear campaign as part of a strategic ploy by VTS and Hanna to tarnish the Ansan’s reputation, thereby boosting VTS’s chances of securing the lucrative contract.
Ansan and Malak sued, claiming that the defamatory article, emails and a poem posted on YouTube suggesting Ansan was “involved in corruption, bribery and money-laundering,” “kick-back schemes” and “tax evasion,” were part of a “common design” to defame the company. Their goal was to improve the odds that VTS would be awarded the contract.
The owners of VTS denied the allegations, claiming Hanna acted on his own when he carried out the defamation campaign.
This matter went on for years but the court rendered the decision just earlier this month. The court concluded that that Hanna and the owners and principals of VTS worked together on the defamation campaign, despite their denials, and awarded Ansan $2.4 million in damages.
One would imagine that the people who own and run Ansan group just wanted to make it stop. In the end the damages were significant and probably far more significant than VTS imagined when they set out on this campaign of defamation.
As lawyers we don’t speak badly about other lawyers because doing so is not professional and it’s a violation of ethical obligations. Besides, we rely on our history of doing good legal work to generate more work. Just like in the world of traffic control services, if a lawyer tries to enhance their business by dissing others, it merely reflects poorly on them.
Please stop singing!
Vivek Ramaswamy is a long-shot candidate for the Republican nomination, hoping to run for president in 2024. Eminem is a rap music artist of some note. One would not see how these two are linked until you learn that at a recent campaign event, Ramaswamy mounted an apparent impromptu performance of Lose Yourself by Eminem.
Ramaswamy holds himself out as a fan. Eminem is clearly not a fan of Ramaswamy because his lawyers promptly wrote to Ramaswamy to notify him to cease and desist from using Eminem’s property (music, lyrics, product of his artistic work) for any further campaign use. If there was any license to use the work, Eminem notified Ramaswamy that the license was revoked.

As a musical artist myself (you can find me on Apple Music and Spotify) I sympathize with Eminem. I would not wish to see my music used in anything designed to promote the Republicans and if they did use it, I would also ask them to stop.
Please stop using vibrating AI anal beads!

The professional chess world is highly competitive and winning at a major championship event can be worth millions to the successful player. What that means is there is a great incentive to cheat and players may suspect that another player is cheating. With huge advances in technology, particularly wearable technology, one must reasonably assume that some players will look for an advantage in technology to cheat.
It is with this in mind that player Magnus Carlsen, who lost to Hans Niemann at the Sinquefield Cup last year, came to suspect that his opponent was using vibrating anal beads to best his competitor.
Niemann, a rising star in the chess world, filed a $100m lawsuit against Magnus Carlsen and others for what appears to be defamation for suggesting that Niemann had cheated. There was some basis to that because Niemann had admitted to cheating earlier in his career. The very strange thing was the way they thought he was cheating. You see, Carlsen seems to have suggested that Niemann may have been cheating using electronic beads of some sort that would give him feedback on plays with vibrations in his lower reaches.
It appears that they’ve now settled the claim without need for a trial, which is great for them but a loss for us. I suppose if anyone is using such beads to cheat, they should probably stop because the chess world will be onto them.
If anyone is thinking about alleging the use of vibrating beads to cheat, don’t make the allegation unless you have solid proof in the form of…
I think I’ll stop right here.
See you next week.