Jones Day Abuses Trademark Law And Gets Its Way: Bullies Blockshopper Into Caving
from the terrible-news dept
Somehow we missed this news last week, but Consumerist alerts us to the very upsetting news that BlockShopper was forced to cave in and settle the absolutely ridiculous lawsuit filed against it by Jones Day. The lawsuit was a clear abuse of trademark law designed to silence a small company, and it looks like the judge did everything possible to help Jones Day achieve its goal. I've spoken with a few Jones Day lawyers who have admitted (quietly, of course) that they're embarrassed their firm did this, but the details of the story seem to get worse with each new step. One thing that seems clear, based on this: Jones Day is not a firm worth working with.If you don't recall the details, Blockshopper is a pretty basic site. It would post news about people who had bought property in certain cities, including Chicago. All it was doing was publishing public information, based on government records, about who was buying property in certain neighborhoods. Apparently, two Jones Day lawyers purchased homes in a part of Chicago covered by Blockshopper. So it wrote about them, and included links to the Jones Day website, indicating that's where they worked. This was accurate, factual information found through public sources. It was not a violation of anyone's privacy, nor was it a violation of trademark law.
However, Jones Day, as a big bad law firm, apparently had no problem suing Blockshopper claiming that it was trademark infringement to link to the Jones Day website, in part because Blockshopper deep-linked the individual's names in the post to their profile pages on the Jones Day website. That is ridiculous by any standard, and an obvious abuse of trademark law. It is simply not a trademark violation to link to a company's website using its name or the name of an employee at the firm -- and the folks at Jones Day obviously know this. But since they are a huge law firm, they can pressure tiny websites to obey. Even worse... the judge in the case helped out. Rather than tossing out the case immediately and reprimanding Jones Day, the judge supposedly told the operator of Blockshopper:
"Do you know, young man, how much money it's going to cost you to defend yourselves against Jones Day?"In other words, the judge wanted Blockshopper to cave. The case started to get some public attention, and a bunch of public interest groups, including Public Knowledge and the EFF filed briefs with the court. At this point Jones Day should have backed down and perhaps issued an apology for abusing trademark law to shut up Blockshopper. Instead, it asked the judge to not even allow the briefs from those groups, saying that because those briefs sided with one party, they were not legit. Apparently Jones Day is unaware that most amici briefs are favoring one side or the other. Stunningly, the judge agreed with Jones Day and refused to even look at the submitted briefs, and also refused to dismiss the case.
As we noted at the time, this would significantly increase the likelihood of Blockshopper settling, because it would (as the judge had noted originally) get expensive quickly. And, indeed, that's exactly what appears to have happened. Blockshopper has agreed to change the way it links to Jones Day, no longer using any anchor text other than the URL itself. As Slate explains:
Instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate."There is simply no legal rationale for Blockshopper to agree to this. There is only the fact that it was going to get expensive to fight such a lawsuit and the judge seemed to clearly favor Jones Day, based on the events so far. Illinois does have a (relatively new) anti-SLAPP law, but it seems like we could definitely use stronger anti-SLAPP rules to stop this sort of abuse of the law to bully small websites. Anyway, you can see the "agreement" below, where Blockshopper agrees that it will not embed deep links to Jones Day's website:
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Filed Under: deep linking, linking, trademark
Companies: blockshopper, jones day
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This is BS
He obviously doesn't give a rats ass about what the law is and is willing to side with a company he for some reason favors. Whether the reason is he got paid or used to work there, I don't know, but its about as fishy as it gets.
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Re: This is BS
Aren't judges supposed to be impartial? Shouldn't the judge have told Jones Day to stuff it, and dismiss the suit? Wasn't that the proper thing to do? Wasn't that the ETHICAL thing to do? Oh, right, ethics and lawyers, water and oil.
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Jones Day
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Re: Jones Day
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Instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate."
as Tiedit is an Ass ?
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Jerkoffs.
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Nice to see the Masnicks maintain a far greater expertise on the law than any Judge.
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Also, hi Mr. Jones Day corporate shill!
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It's pretty easy for a layman to spot corruption.
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I love these types of smears. They attack me personally but give nothing to support their position. So convincing.
Considering the number of lawyers who weighed in on this case, all pointing to what an abuse of trademark law this was, I think it is, quite clearly, an abuse of trademark law.
Would you like to supply at least a shred of evidence to the contrary?
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Re: Re:
The judge and the number of lawyers who dissagree with you.
The fact that your sure of the facts of the case you are blogging about "...the judge supposedly told...".
The fact that you often give legal opinions in situations that completely confuse you (which render your opinion completely worthless).
I could go on but I don't want to rant like a Masnick.
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Um. What about all the lawyers who pointed out how this was an abuse of trademark law?
The fact that you often give legal opinions in situations that completely confuse you
Hmm. That is not a fact, it's an opinion. And can you explain what situations "completely confuse" me.
I find it amusing that you still have failed to give one shred of evidence as to why this would be a legitimate trademark lawsuit.
I'm guessing it's because you can't.
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so your not sure what happened but you want to be outraged ?
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It's "you're" not "your" by the way.
And I'm not sure what you mean in saying that I'm not sure what happened. The timeline of events is pretty clear. Are you suggesting something did not happen?
This is the same "Anonymous Coward" above who attacked me without providing any facts to the contrary, so I guess it's no surprise that he did it again.
For your information, if you want to critique something someone wrote, it helps to provide counter evidence. If you can't do that, we all just assume you have no argument.
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The Company
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Power Mad
Jones Day
Jones Day
Jones Day
Jones Day
There, they can sue me too.
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Reverse Streisand Effect?
What if the idea was to show everyone that they can influence a case in their favor and attract new clients as to sue anyone with a completely stupid/bogus claim?
The way things have been going on lately I think this serves as a great example that money talks and bullshit walks.
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You aren't linking deep enough...
Jones Day that got upset about deep linking. Maybe it was Wendy A. Aeschlimann or Robert Dean Avery (Partner) maybe even Lynn Leland Coe, who really knows> I imagine it is someone on this Jones Day Professional search page in Chicago though.
I'm sure Mike M. can let us know which people it was, right Mike? Make you could update the article.
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Re: You aren't linking deep enough...
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Re: You aren't linking deep enough...
you can just tweak the url for the search page and you get a list of their employees worldwide... to do that just do not specify any region code at all, like this, or an even shorter url, like this. Currently that list has 2548 results (bios). Feel free to sort the list by title, name or office/country.
For other languages, just use the drop-down in the upper-right corner of that page (or this one) and just press the search button on the form, without entering any data.
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New Slogan
"Jones Day, when you care enough to buy the best (Judges, that is)."
I agree that this is probably more high profile 'marketing' than anything else. They have proved that they can force companies to settle when there is no legal reason for them to, so now they can go after all those clients who have a 'small or slim' chance at winning, and they can promote the fact that they can probably force a settlement even when their client has no case...
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email...
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Perhaps if you read the various proceedings before the federal district court you might gain a slightly different perspective. The proceedings can be found at:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/jones-day-v-blockshopper-llc
The court's opinion and order on Blockshopper's Motion to Dismiss is quite comprehensive and informative.
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Are you serious? We must be reading different documents.
Since you didn't link to the actual document, I will:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/2008-11-13-Memorandum%20Opinion%20an d%20Order%20in%20Jones%20Day%20v.%20Blockshopper.pdf
that's hardly "informative." It just highlights how wrong this situation is. The idea that linking to the site can be seen as possibly confusing or an endorsement by the Jones Day is so laughable it's scary that someone actually thinks it's legitimate.
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Merely as an aside, if the presiding judge was wrong in his application of the law to the defendants' Motion to Dismiss the federal and state claims, was he also wrong in dismissing from the case the two individual defendants?
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I've said it before...
And seriously, if you're faced with a biased judge, an anti-SLAPP law isn't going to do you a bit of good.
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don't forget to profile the judge too
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How about NAMING the
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Re: How about NAMING the
Jones Day Lawyer Jacob Tiedt
Jones Day Lawyer Dan Malone
Honestly Darrah just seems out of touch and biased, (the guy is 71 years old) and Tiedt and Malone are just thin skinned softies who live under the illusion that their public information should be private. Being lawyers, they turned to fill the perceived square hole problem with the only thing they had in their toolbox - round lawsuit pegs.
On a side note, they need to get new photographers, out of a random sampling of their associates almost all of them had very soulless pictures.
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"do you know how much it will cost you to defend yourself in this case?"
What BULLSHIT!
I expect JUDGES to deal in JUSTICE.
Sadly most of them are just spoiled (as in rotten) old lawyers, fire the lot of them, over and over till they remember what their actual job is supposed to be!
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Maybe it's just me . . .
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/. slamming JonesDay
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Indirect Linking?
I'm in Illinois, know for honest politicians and judges worldwide, so this is strictly hypothetical. But as a web developer, I'm a little concerned about the potential effects of this case.
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Jones Day Abuses Trademark Law And Gets Its Way
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JD
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Blockshopper
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