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If a corporation cheats you out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by refusing to honor a contract, then if you threaten to publicly expose them if they continue to refuse to honor the contract, is that blackmail?
A few days ago I noted that in 1997 I published a book through Nova Science Publishers, Inc. and that I have a signed copy of a contract with them, yet I have never received a penny from them in the 14 years that the book has been selling.
Recently, my son determined that the book is currently being sold by at least 80 vendors throughout the world and is stocked in at least 84 libraries that he could determine, and is selling well in the UK, Japan, India, Germany, Australia, and Canada in addition to the U.S. My educated guess based on the information he’s given me is that they have sold at least a million dollars worth of my books, and probably a lot more, in which case they’d owe me at least $150,000 according to my contract.
I also noted that past repeated attempts by me to contact the company to request an accounting of my book sales were completely ignored by them. But my son wrote them an e-mail threatening to sue them last week and actually got a response from them saying that they will forward the information he gave them for action. However, I doubt very much that they will do that.
If they refuse to honor my contract, my son knows how to use social media to cause substantial harm to their reputation by publicly exposing what they have done to me. Can anyone tell me: If we threaten them with exposing their fraud unless they honor my contract, is that legally considered blackmail?
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