Apparently blog comments and online forums aren’t the only place you can troll these days. If you want to make the leap to the big leagues, you can self-publish a book on Amazon, and then sue people for posting critical reviews. Only sometimes it backfires.

An author who tried to sue … is facing a six figure legal bill after a judge struck out his case.

Chris McGrath, an online entrepreneur from Milton Keynes, tried to sue Vaughan Jones, 28, from Nuneaton, over a series of reviews and postings he made on the Amazon website about his self-published and little-known book “The Attempted Murder of God”.

Amazon, the prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and his eponymous foundation were also named as defendants because they either carried the review or discussion threads linked to it that Mr McGrath claimed were libellous.

via The Independent.

The article also notes that Mr. McGrath’s book had a number of defenders—all of whom turned out to be himself.

During proceedings it emerged that the author had used a number of online pseudonyms to review his self-published book and come to his defence once people began to criticise his work.

McGrath shows himself to be an Olympic-class contender in the online trolling competition with this response:

He rounded on libel reform campaigners, stating that British law had made it all but impossible for litigants in person such as himself to successfully bring a libel case. He also defended his use of online pseudonyms stating that he was “trying to pull off a complicated satire” at the time.

Sadly, he still has an opportunity to appeal, which would mean a further financial burden on Amazon, Dawkins and the RDF. But at least this case may give further impetus to the effort to reform British libel laws which—McGrath’s whining notwithstanding—are far too biased in favor of the claimant.