You might be surprised how difficult it is to bring suit against someone from an ocean away and particularly if you have limited financial resources with which to do so.

The courts can only find someone guilty if they’re brought to justice, unfortunately to initiate a civil trial requires lots of money which is what Sam has managed to prevent from reaching the people doing the actual work at Blognation.

Patrick, you’re a blogger so I have to assume you are a reasonable writer as well. You may have meant to say what you just said above in your comment, but I assure you, that was not clear in your original post.

Oliver

And yes we can not forget about this, this will always be a classic case of how not to do business, but I was pointing at the throwing the mud thing.
My point was to please forget about ‘scam’ Sethi (not his victims and to focus on the great things the web can give us. To go on with our lives. Leave the bad things behind and go on with the good ones, how hard that may be for some of the people involved.

All the best

Sethi might be guilty of a lot of things but the place to actually FIND him guilty is in court, not on this blog. It is time to stop throwing mud and actually take legal action. If Sam is found guilty, officially, Patrick will be the first to write about it.

Like Triona, I have to take exception to your post above. Not only because it feels more or less like you are still giving “Scam” Sethi the benefit of the doubt to a certain degree but also – and even more specifically – because you seem to have come to the conclusion that in a few weeks this will all blow over like it should.

The reason I take exception is that you seem to have completely overlooked (or disregarded) the fact that there are some very real victims here; victims that should not be forgotten.

In your words you say:

Blogging and the web are about openness and transparency, not about lies, scams and taking other people down. I think this storm will pass by and that everybody will forget about Blognation and this whole mud throwing thing. We’ll get back to normal life and write about all the cool things going on in the tech scene.

In this brief passage you basically disregard so much of what is important about blogging that I don’t think it is an exaggeration to call your words callous, heartless, ignorant and disrespectful.

I also think you’d feel considerably differently if you were one of the editors that had a contract in hand and went about your job in as conscientious and professional a manner as possible only to discover after several months of broken promises, exaggerations, evasion and lies that the money you were expecting and which you had been promised over and over was just a few days away was not there and was never going to be there.

Lest it slip your mind (as well as the collective consciousness of the tech community) the content that people professed to enjoy, claimed to find interesting, and which in some cases was directly beneficial to entrepreneurs and companies was created by a group of dedicated and hard working individuals. These folks (myself included) put their time, intellect and in many cases forwent other opportunities to create this content – much of which is time sensitive and basically expires within a day or two of publication.

Scam promised to pay and backed that promise with a contract. He defaulted on his word and his legal obligation. Luckily for him, most of the people he robbed (and lets make no mistake about it, when you do what Scam did it is robbery) are so financially damaged from going four or more months working full time for him without receiving a penny for it that they are in no position to initiate litigation – it’s tough to pay an attorney when you’re worried about making next month’s mortgage payment of buying Christmas gifts for your kids.

I really think you need to rethink this post and your sentiment that this should all blow over and be forgotten. It should not be forgotten; ever.

People should never allow Scam Sethi the least bit of opportunity to perpetrate this sort of crime again. The community should hold him accountable for his actions and this cannot occur if everyone forgets what transpired.

I’m sorry if this issue has caused ripples across your happy little blogosphere pond, and I’m sorry if you don’t like being reminded of the ugly side to this business, but you chose to weigh in on the subject and I don’t think you gave fair and proper consideration to the real issue when you did.

Maybe none of what I’ve said here will influence your thinking one bit. Perhaps you still feel that this whole noisome event should trouble, as Barbara Bush says “your pretty little mind no more”. On the other hand, perhaps while you’re watching your kids open presents on Christmas morning, or maybe when you come across an article that was originally published on Blognation, you’ll give a thought to the people that created that content and ask yourself how merry their Christmas morning was and it it’s really fair and right and just that this whole thing be forgotten.

If by some misfortune you found yourself in such a situation, how would you feel if someone else wrote “everybody will forget about Patrick and we can get back to the normal talk of things that are cooler and not messy or human.”

Personally, I don’t think you’d be quite so quick to want the topic banished but that’s just my opinion and like Dennis Miller says, I could be wrong.

Oliver Starr

As long as your clear about your intentions (I’m not paying bloggers or I’m paying them) and you can follow through it is good. In the Blognation case it is clear that that didn’t happen. Still hoping that somebody is going tow rite a thriller on this :)

Do you know Sam’s new nickname? ‘Scam Sethi’