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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I love the veiled threat to "take a legal approach" in the last email. If I ever take over the world, there will be a law where if you imply that you're investigating litigation, you have to file your case within 24 hours or the ability expires.

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That would be a really, really annoying world, because people wouldn't threaten litigation, they would actually just start suing immediately. If you have only two choices: to not do anything and put yourself at risk, or start the expensive and time-consuming litigation process, the latter will be the "smart" move more often than not. Products and services would become more expensive, there would be fewer free things, there would be more weasel words and fucked up clauses in ToS, etc. Let's not go down that path.

Hahaha true, and that's really not even a terrible idea to give 24 hours.

We definitely ended things on a good note with Hegarty & Educake. They were really friendly to us and also super helpful to be honest, good team over there.

That's good to hear. Maybe it wasn't a veiled threat, but rather an attempt to be nice. ("A lot of companies would sue you right now, but we would never do that," could be an alternate reading.)

100% veiled threat. Even the "a lot of companies.." interpretation is just a reminder of their power should you not want to hop on that call.

He explicitly avoided saying he wouldn't do it. He said he prefered not to, because he was making a threat to harm the person who exposed his incompetence and caused no harm.

I think this was an "educational experience" in the truest sense. Hegarty showed the spirit of a true educator. This is a situation that can end up with legal action -- but there is a much better path for both sides! Young people may not know the ramifications of their actions, and it is much better to show the range of outcomes and work together for a mutually beneficial solution.

There is a much weaker disadvantage for a party threatening litigation, which is that the recipient of the threat could choose to sue for declaratory judgment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment

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