This is a very frightening look at what is a growing trend in
America today. The site in question? KlearGear.com.
http://www.kleargear.com/help.html this is a link to the page that is brought up in this news article.
We could not find where KlearGear has any claim in their policy saying that customers can not give bad reviews of the site anywhere else online and to even have that as a policy is a breach of the freedom of speech. Now it's not to say that KlearGear did not at one time have this policy. We simply do not know nor is there a cached copy of it found anywhere online that we found. After looking the KlearGear site over, it's not where we would want to do any
online shopping for ourselves. Their product line is interesting novelty geek items. Nothing that could not be found when searching
eBay or
Amazon however. Prices? A bit high for what you are getting. Does anyone really need an
Iron Man flash drive?
What we saw on the KlearGear.com site help page that gave us a major red flag was the claim that they own the copyrights to the software behind the site, yet on other parts of the site it seems that they are referring to using
Linux and
GNU technology for the site. If you know anything about Linux, there is no such thing as copyrights to the GNU codes.
Further, the above
news story really does not make sense. There is a lot of information withheld that we are not being told. How did KlearGear.com get the judgement for the $3,500.00 in question? That would have required a lawsuit to have been filed and won. Did the couple ignore a lawsuit? We are simply not told. If there was no lawsuit, then all the couple really had to do was file a legal complaint with the 3 credit reporting agencies who would then initiate an investigation. If the investigation could not substantiate the claim, the claim is then removed from their credit report. Was this tried?
The
CNN news coverage is sketchy at it's very best. The bottom line is we do not see anything directly against KlearGear.com that could warrent the above news story and we also can not tell what the real facts are about the case we just looked at. Again, KlearGear.com is not where we would look to shop, but on the other side of the coin, we also see no reason to avoid the site for anyone who appreaicates the types of offerings the site has. It's more along the lines that the CNN news story is not a story at all but instead, a mass confusion disinformation piece of media.
This is why we usually refuse to watch TV anymore. We all to often have all of these questions after viewing most so called news stories and find out that they were not really news stories at all. They were just misleading disinformation pieces of trash to fill holes in time slots, in our opinions. If the above is now regarded as
investigative journalism, then they can keep it. It lacked real investigations and information as we just pointed out. The only real winner here? KlearGear for all the free publicity. For even bad publicity is better than no publicity. It still brings people to your site.
