Cardiff Legal

Met­ro­pol­itan Inter­na­tional Schools Lim­ited, trad­ing as Skill­sTrain, provides dis­tance learn­ing courses in IT and Com­puter skills.

The Court Forum

A Google search for Skill­sTrain reveals com­ment­ar­ies on vari­ous online for­ums alleging that the firms courses are poorly run or mis­lead­ing. In some cases, the courses are described as “scams”.

The BBC’s Watch­dog pro­gram high­lighted some of the exper­i­ences of stu­dents who under­took the Skill­sTrain courses. It describes how the courses were enti­cingly advert­ised to “fas­track [a] career in IT…” with the prom­ise of luc­rat­ive earn­ing within the industry on com­ple­tion of the course.

Com­plaints

But com­plaints from over 200 stu­dents ranged from a lack of sup­port from course tutors, to com­pletely out­dated and inef­fect­ive course mater­i­als. Watch­dog asked for a second opin­ion of the courses on offer from Microsoft — as most of the train­ing mater­i­als were based on Microsoft soft­ware pro­grams — who were less than impressed:

Dar­ren Strange, Microsoft Office Product Man­ager in the UK, looked at the course mater­i­als that were provided […] by Skill­sTrain and agreed that parts of it needed updat­ing. He said: “I would have con­cerns about some­body doing this course.”

The most voci­fer­ous com­plain­ants said the courses were scams and a num­ber of com­plaints were made to Trad­ing Stand­ards, who estab­lished that at some point Skill­sTrain did not have proper licences for using some Microsoft soft­ware in their train­ing courses. Cur­rent stu­dents were con­cerned that their qual­i­fic­a­tions might not be valid as a result.

Legal Action

How­ever, Skill Centre has sub­sequently made con­cer­ted efforts to restore its image as a legit­im­ate course pro­vider and sought to arrest the tidal wave of neg­at­ive online com­ments about their courses by tak­ing legal action against one par­tic­u­lar forum. Met­ro­pol­itan Inter­na­tional Schools Lim­ited took civil action in the UK High Court against Design­tech­nica Cor­por­a­tion, T/​A Digital Trends, and Google for defam­a­tion, relat­ing to claims on the Digital Trends Forum that Skill­sTrain signed up stu­dents regard­less of their suit­ab­il­ity for the course; that their rep­res­ent­at­ives “employed a bogus and fraud­u­lent credit check­ing and loan fin­an­cing assess­ment that does not com­ply with UK con­sumer credit law”; that some of the courses are over elab­or­ate and not value for money etc.

Google were found not liable for any defam­at­ory state­ments that came up in their search res­ults but Skill­sTrain won the case against the forum host and received £50,000 in dam­ages. The com­pany then made a strongly worded press release stat­ing that this was a vic­tory against for­ums that car­ried inac­cur­ate claims, sug­gest­ing that poten­tially any con­sumer forum could be found liable for defam­at­ory com­ments made by users.

For­ums in danger?

So, are con­sumer for­ums — such as Con­sumer­ac­tion­group, Money­ex­pert and Tri­pad­visor — in jeop­ardy? Can they afford to risk of host­ing unsub­stan­ti­ated com­ments and reviews?

If the Skill­sTrain press release is con­sidered on its own, it would sug­gest these sites would be at risk or would have to change the way they oper­ate. How­ever, in the cor­rect con­text of the decision, there is no increased risk, as the let­ter fails to explain the Judge’s decision. The Judge­ment itself explains that libel law pre­sumes the party accused of libel must prove this alleg­a­tion wrong. If the forum is unable to prove that the state­ments made by users were true, then they are guilty of libel.

But using this rational alone, there would be thou­sands of cases in civil courts each year. In real­ity, the party bring­ing the action must prove that real dam­age to repu­ta­tion or income has been caused by the libel­lous com­ments. Usu­ally, the libelled party will notify the other that the state­ment made is false. Legal action only tends to occur if the state­ments are not amended or removed.

In this case, after tak­ing legal advice, Digital Trends refused to remove the state­ments and then later ignored fur­ther requests to remove them. Skill­sTrain argued that the forum facil­it­ated a wide pub­lic­a­tion of the defam­at­ory com­ments which led them to lose sub­scrip­tions from poten­tial stu­dents. The judge agreed that the forum could not sub­stan­ti­ate the com­ments made on the forum and this led to Skill­sTrain suf­fer­ing a loss. This is the reason for the decision.

Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, web-​forums will warn con­trib­ut­ors that any defam­at­ory state­ments will be removed. Of course, the first a forum tends to find out that a com­ment may be defam­at­ory is when they receive notice from the aggrieved party. Most for­ums will remove or sus­pend the com­ment until sub­stan­ti­ated and if so, legal action is unlikely to res­ult. This means that users still have the right to ‘fair com­ment’ and for­ums have the right to pub­li­cise them, unless they have good reason not to.

So it would appear that the Skill­sTrain decision does not “change the game” with respect to con­sumer for­ums but simply rein­forces the exist­ing rules regard­ing libel. What the decision does do is update for­ums on the steps they must take to ensure they do not per­petu­ate libel­lous com­ments. Had Digital Trends simply mod­er­ated or removed the com­ments after Skill­sTrain had made formal rep­res­ent­a­tions, they would not have been sued.

As for Skill­sTrain, they are yet to silence the many com­plaints that are still being made about the courses they provide.