The owner of PetsWarehouse.com is suing an informal group of aquatic plant hobbyists for over $15 million after several of them posted online remarks about his company's customer service, reports Salon. He's even suing people who merely displayed banners for the plant folks' legal defense fund.
Boy, if anybody ever asked to be Googlebombed, it sounds like it's this guy. But the Googlebombing may have already happened without any concerted effort; 4 of the 10 top Google hits on "pets warehouse" (at this writing) are sites that support the defendents.
The legal jargon for a lawsuit intended to shut down legitimate critics is a "SLAPP" suit ("Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation"). There are anti-SLAPP efforts in a lot of places that should limit legal harassment of this sort. But an interesting question is whether SLAPP suits against online communities will blow up into so much negative publicity that the problem becomes self-regulating.