QVC has sued a blogger, Donn Edwards for posting what it considers to be defamatory posts around the ethics of their business practice. In short, QVC lures people to presentations with the promise of a prize (car, holiday, whatever). When you go to pick up your prize, you have to sit through a presentation, and are then sold some sort of timeshare.

It’s scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to ethics, and it sucks.

QVC is suing for over R450,000 because they claim that as a result of reading Edwards’ blog, the following happened:

• 59 people refused to attend the presentation. Since QVC has a conversion rate of 15% at R6,000 (each) profit, this works out to a loss of R 54,000.00

• 15 members refused to pay their management fees, amounting to a further R52,500 loss.

So, let’s see…..

One lonesome blog, that is mostly focused on writing about computer security, and whose audience is probably least likely to be talked into a QVC sale anyway, has cost QVC R106,000 pure profit.

So what do they do? They go and sue the blogger. And what do the rest of us do? We write and comment about it. More blogs write. Newspapers pick up the story. It gets bigger…and bigger…and BIGGER.

Oops.

Also, keep in mind that the QVC loss came despite the fact that Edwards removed his posts. How will these losses escalate for posts that are not removed? And are indexed by Google? For ever. And, umm, ….ever.

It’s actually kind of funny.