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Comment by sufehmi | Hacker News Reader

"extorted"

This is pure slander

The company can avoid this if they only care to maintain the documentation / wiki left behind by said person

When they failed to do even just basic proper operations, it's their own fault.

I'm a business owner and a consultant, and I too charge more for these kind of asshole clients, because of the extra stress.

But nowadays I just try to avoid them, it's just too damaging for your own sanity. Their kind of stupidity, self-entitlement, and ignorance is on a completely different level.

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> This is pure slander

<pedantry>It's libel (written) not slander (oral); "defamation" is the generic noun. </pedantry>

Does libel magically turn into slander if a blind person uses a screen reader? Asking for a friend. ;-)

Your comment made me curious and I checked - it is not the physical channel that matters, it is whether the media is _transient_ or not.

It seems that paying to skywrite (you know, small plane making artificial clouds) could be slander but not libel

> whether the media is _transient_ or not

Citation? By that light, a DVD containing defamatory speech would be libelous, but that's generally not how courts see it.

From the (highly-influential) U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, summarizing New York law (which is quite typical): "Defamation, consisting of the twin torts of libel and slander, is the invasion of the interest in a reputation and good name. Generally, spoken defamatory words are slander; written defamatory words are libel. Libel is a method of defamation expressed in writing or print." [0]

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=601727562995661...

There is also "calumny", which is the action of slandering someone (and I assume also making writing libellous statements. After writing that parenthetical, I just googled, and libel is also a verb. So I guess I can say libelling someone)

What about the other way, subtitles.

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