Business law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 16

Business law - Essay Example The purpose of the law is to protect the plaintiff’s reputation, and so the statement must be published to third party, for it to amount to defamation. Therefore, this means that for defamation to occur, a third party must be involved (Best and burner 773). Defamation can be either libel, which is a permanent statement through print media or video, or slander, which is just a spoken form of word. Therefore, for someone to claim for damages on defamation, he/ she needs to prove that the defendant’s statement was defamatory, and that that it referred to her / him and that its publication was a malicious act. In our case here, Stanford Engineering, Inc launches an advertisement, claiming that their competitors, Cornell Code Corporation are using their customers, to ‘test’ their software. This statement is defamatory, since it ruins the reputation of Cornell Ltd, in the eyes of their customers. For Cornell to sue for un-liquidated damages on defamation, they will have to prove that the advert was defamatory. This can be proved by the fact that customers will avoid using their â€Å"allegedly untested software’ and shift business to Stanford Corporation. The statement is defamatory to Cornell limited because it ruins the reputation of the company, in the eyes of the current and potential customers. Cornell Ltd also need to prove that the defamatory statement referred to them, and this is straight forward, because the advert was clearly stating that the plaintiff (Cornell Ltd) were marketing untested software. Moreover, Cornell needs to show that there was malice, in the publication of the statement. The mare fact that Stanford and Cornell corporations are competitors clearly shows that the main intention of Stanford, in publication of this advert was to ruin the reputation of their competitors, so that they can win their customers. Publishing false information against a competitor, in order to make them lose customers is