Liz Fong-Jones sued Vincent Zhen, the owner of Flow Chemical Pty Ltd, in Australia for AU$400,000 for defamation. To demonstrate how insane this is, I will chart the distance between Vincent and the posts which Liz Fong-Jones alleges defame him.
1. Vincent, an Australian, owns Flow Chemical, an Australian company.
2. Flow Chemical has IP addresses through APNIC, an Australian non-profit.
3. Flow Chemical leases some IP addresses to 1776 Solutions, LLC in Wyoming.
4. I, a Floridian, own 1776 Solutions, LLC.
5. 1776 Solutions, LLC has provided service to my other company, Lolcow LLC.
6. Lolcow LLC (West Virginia) owns the Kiwi Farms’s assets and licenses for posts.
7. Users of the Kiwi Farms, who are mostly American, made posts about LFJ.
8. LFJ alleges these posts are both untrue and defamatory.
Therefore, the courts believe Vincent personally owes half a million dollars.
I know Vinny and speak to him maybe four times a year on average. We live on different continents in completely different timezones and it is hard to maintain a friendship over that sort of distance. As a result, Vincent knows almost nothing about the Kiwi Farms or what I do, and has no say in how I use the IP addresses I pay for.
In affidavits supplied to Australian court, Liz Fong-Jones has promised under penalty of perjury that these IP addresses are critical to the Kiwi Farms’s operations, uptime, and (most importantly) ability to deliver mean posts about him to the world-wide Internet.
We have not used these IP addresses in a year, and only used them publicly for less than a year. How critical these IP addresses are can be easily determined by the fact that the Kiwi Farms remains available to the world-wide Internet, and that we do not use any Flow Chemical IP addresses in doing so. It would be accurate to say that we enjoy more uptime without using Vinny’s IP addresses, due to very technical reasons that Liz Fong-Jones has learned to exploit — broadly, how to complain to ISPs and get entire networks removed from the Internet.
Vinny is very stubborn. He trusted the Government to recognize the flagrantly spurious and fallacious nature of these accusations and dismiss them on its own, sua sponte. He also is a busy person who has better things to do with his time and money than be sued by a lunatic. I continually advised him against inaction, perhaps once a month every month, until he was guilty by default.
He is working on the slow and expensive process of overturning the default.
The real victory of this judgment is that Liz Fong-Jones can now pretend it says the Kiwi Farms is illegal and/or creates civil liability for its hosts. Indeed, it has appeared in numerous articles published by the usual suspects who tend to polish Liz Fong-Jones, and these articles have somehow found their way to the Kiwi Farms’s Wikipedia page, despite zero direct involvement between Kiwi Farms and Flow Chemical or Vincent.
Liz Fong-Jones is nothing if not incredibly spiteful. The money and resources he has acquired are merely tokens for him to purchase human misery.
