on the cover / By Hank Sims

Roasted

Coffee and Internet voodoo at the Sacred Grounds libel trial.

(Feb. 22, 2007) On the stand last week, Pamela Olsen, co-owner with her husband of a small coffee roasting company called Bayside Roasters, cried when she recounted the feelings she had gone through in November and December of 2005.

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving of that year, she got a call from one of her customers telling her to check out her company’s website. She tried to do so, but she kept being redirected to another page - a specific page of “The Urban Dictionary,” a comedy website, that gave several off-color definitions of the word “asshole.” Being a computer novice, she assumed that she had done something wrong, so she kept trying. Finally she realized that her website was the Urban Dictionary page. The photos of her family and their life story were all gone. In their place: “Asshole.”

Pamela and Kregen Olsen of Bayside Roasters. Photo by Hank Sims.

GALLERY >

She and her husband Kregen, who roasted the coffee and did most all the legwork for the company, were freaked out. They sought out a friend they had hired to do work on the site, and who had the passwords to their Internet account. After a little bit of headscratching, the friend figured out that the domain name associated with their website - “www.baysideroasters.com” - no longer belonged to the Olsens. It belonged to Tim Dominick, co-owner of Sacred Grounds Organic Coffee Roasters - their direct competitor.

It was at that moment in the story that Pamela Olsen, on the stand testifying in the long-brewing lawsuit she and her husband had brought against Dominick, first shed tears.

“My thought was, they’re really out to get us now, and we’re going down,” she said.

As has already been reported in the Times-Standard and elsewhere, the Olsens’ lawsuit against Tim Dominick prevailed last week. The jury ruled, in essence, that Tim Dominick had used the Internet like a shaman uses a voodoo doll. He captured a piece of electronic property that had once belonged to his competitors, and proceeded to stick pins in it. The jury found that he had libeled Pamela and Kregen Olsen, his competitors in the Humboldt County coffee industry, and that he maliciously intended to inflict emotional distress upon them.

The Internet is still a new medium. For most people, it’s a weird and sometimes frightening place, only half understood and somewhat akin to magic. For some people, the rules of online behavior are completely different from everyday life. Tim Dominick never would have printed up posters associating Kregen Olsen and Bayside Roasters with the word “asshole,” but for some reason he didn’t flinch at doing so electronically, in the comfort of his home or place of business.

What this case showed, first, was how badly a momentary act of electronic vandalism can injure someone, especially when the vandal insists upon his right to vandalize. More surprisingly, the case also demonstrated how badly, and how strangely, such actions can backfire.

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