The New Image College of Fine Arts and its owners Charlie Van Dyke and John Craig are suing Google Inc., Google Canada Corp. and two unknown defendants for writing allegedly defamatory anonymous reviews that accuse the school of encouraging students to write positive reviews online in exchange for good grades.
In a notice of civil claim filed on November 7 in BC Supreme Court, the plaintiffs claim the Google reviews are false and damaging to their reputation. The postings, which were first published in October 2011, also allegedly accuse Van Dyke and Craig of authoring reviews themselves “with the dishonest intention of providing the public with a false positive impression about New Image’s sub-standard and poor quality programs” to lure students in, the lawsuit states.
The purpose of the postings, according to the lawsuit, “was to cause commercial harm to the plaintiffs, harm the plaintiffs and to expose them to hatred, ridicule and contempt, to lower them in the estimation of others, and to cause them to be shunned and avoided.”
Global Model & Talent Inc., which does business as the New Image College of Fine Arts, Van Dyke and Craig seek unspecified damages for the alleged defamation, an injunction to restrain further publication of the alleged “defamatory expression” and an order for the defendants to remove and retract the postings. None of the allegations has been proven in court and the defendants had not filed a response at press time.
