Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle
Last edited Tue Jul 25, 2017, 08:24 AM - Edit history (1)
The Atlantic
Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle
The internet’s favorite fact-checkers are caught in a messy dispute.
On Monday, the editorial staff of Snopes.com wrote a short plea for help. The post said that the site needed money to fund its operations because another company that Snopes had contracted with “continues to essentially hold the Snopes.com web site hostage.”
“Our legal team is fighting hard for us, but, having been cut off from all revenue, we are facing the prospect of having no financial means to continue operating the site and paying our staff (not to mention covering our legal fees) in the meanwhile,” the note continued.
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Snopes began in the early 1990s as a small website built by the husband-and-wife team of David and Barbara Mikkelson. Snopes was what you sent to your cousins who circulated crazy conspiracy theories from their Hotmail accounts. In 2003, the Mikkelsons founded a parent company, Bardav, for the site.
-snip-
The founders divorced in 2015, some titillating details of which became public. Both founders received 50 percent of the company.
In the summer of that year, Bardav had entered into an agreement with a newish San Diego company called Proper Media to “provide content and website development services as well as advertising sales and trafficking” to Snopes. Proper Media’s principals were Chris Richmond, who had founded a wiki called TV Tropes, and Drew Schoentrup, both now described in court filings as residents of Puerto Rico (more on that shortly). Each of these men had a 40 percent share in the company. They were joined by three other people who had smaller equity stakes: Tyler Dunn, Ryan Miller, and Vincent Green.
In July 2016, Barbara Mikkelson sold her half of Bardav to these five men, leaving her ex-husband with five new partners in the company. Because Bardav was an S corporation, its shareholders had to be people, not other companies. So, the stock purchase agreement between Mikkelson and the men assigned them each equity on the same split that they had in Proper Media.
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But behind the scenes, there was trouble. Proper Media’s CEO and president had moved to Puerto Rico, according to a cross-complaint filed by Green, and corroborated by their own filings. They set up a separate company there, which Green claims was a tax-avoidance scheme that he told them he was uncomfortable with.
Meanwhile, in a story as old as media, the site’s editors worried that the co-owners didn’t understand what Snopes was, and that they only wanted to juice its revenues, so they could sell it.
More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/the-ugly-dispute-threatening-snopes/534708/
Hope they survive. Even Joy Ann Reid quoted them to Repub apologist to counter his repeating of fabricated HRC 'scandals.'
Saw this tweet day after I put up OP:
Check out @snopes's Tweet:
Link to tweet
?s=09
= new reply since forum marked as read
