Another blogger found herself embroiled in a lawsuit stemming from an online restaurant review she posted that said a restaurant had used a rusty grill when preparing her food.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily yesterday reported that a 28-year-old female blogger, surnamed Hsia (夏), in June 2009 posted a photograph on her blog which apparently showed that a yakiniku (grilled meat) restaurant in Gongguan (公館), Taipei, had used a rusty grill.
The initial entry was followed in May last year with another posting that said the restaurant failed to take responsibility for the problem.
The restaurant rejected the accusation, saying that what might have looked like rust in the photograph was actually barbeque sauce that had not been completely cleaned from the grill. As recourse, the restaurant filed a defamation suit against Hsia.
Hsia, who made a court appearance in April as part of the lawsuit, added a post on her blog saying that she was sued by the yakiniku restaurant because of the incident.
She also wrote in the post that businesses such as these were cockroaches, who “managed to continue to hassle the human world because everyone turns a blind eye to them, allowing the cockroaches to grow fat and become arrogant.”
However, this post resulted in the restaurant leveling another lawsuit against her for public humiliation.
Meanwhile, Banciao District (板橋) prosecutors found that Hsia’s posts about the restaurant, which included photographs as evidence as well as some positive comments about the restaurant’s food, did not constitute defamation.
However, prosecutors found her follow-up post, which referred to the restaurant as a cockroach, to have crossed the line from reasonable discussion or commentary into slander which had caused damage to the restaurant’s reputation.
Therefore, the prosecutors charged Hsia with public humiliation on Friday.
The incident follows the recent case of a blogger who lost a defamation lawsuit to another restaurant that was upset with the blogger’s negative review.
In a separate court ruling by the Greater Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday, the court sentenced a blogger who wrote that a restaurant’s beef noodles were too salty to 30 days in detention and two years of probation, as well as ordering her to pay NT$200,000.
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