Selling A Printer Can Get You Sued, And Other Facts - Digg

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WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK

Selling A Printer Can Get You Sued, And Other Facts

Steve Rousseau

Jun 10 2016, 11:31 AM

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Welcome To What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: why you shouldn't sell anything online, groups of clams are scary and men eat too much.

SO SUE US... NO DON'T DO THAT

Selling Anything Online Is Fraught With Legal Peril

The story of Doug Costello, a man who just wanted to sell a printer, and Gersh Zavodnik, a man who sued him over it, involves a printer but has little to do with printers. No, this six-and-a-half year legal struggle over a $40 printer is yet another example of some of the bureaucratic nightmares the US legal system can accidentally birth.

You see, Zavodnik is known within Indiana legal circles as a bit of an abuser of the justice system. He files frivolous lawsuits. He bought a printer from Costello, claimed it was broken, and then sued him for $30,000 in damages. Obviously, the courts would eventually throw this out, so Zavodnik then filed two requests for admissions, demanding Costello acknowledge responsibility for another $900,000 in damages. Costello, as any sane but not legally-savy person would do, just ignored them. Unfortunately, according to Indiana trial law, you can't just do that. After 30 days of silence, the Indiana courts took that as a "Yeah, sounds good," and now Costello was on the hook for a cool million dollars in damages.

After going through a whole slew of judges, Special Judge J. Jeffery Edens performed the legal equivalent of just throwing up his hands and awarded Zavodnik $30,044.07. His decision, which admitted the damages were "seemingly high," boiled down to that lovely bureaucratic catch-all: This sucks, but hey, rules are rules.

Thankfully, an appeal by Costello brought the case to the attention of yet another judge, who then promptly threw this nonsense out. Zavodnik claims his abuse of tort law is to expose corruption within the legal system. Which, sure yeah, mission accomplished. But at what cost? I suppose that's how the citizens of Gotham feel about Batman.

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