ICanHasLawsuit? Pet Holdings Sues Other Site For Framing Failbooking With Better Domain Name
from the lollawyers dept
A few weeks ago, when I attended Public Knowledge's World Fair Use Day, I had been excited to meet the guy behind ICanHasCheezburger, Ben Huh, who was supposed to be on my panel, talking about how the various sites he ran make use of fair use all the time. Unfortunately, at the last minute he had to bail. But given how much the network of sites relies on fair use, you would think that the company he represents, Pet Holdings, would be gentle about suing others on copyright claims. Not so much, apparently.Jhn alerts us to the news that Pet Holdings appears to have sued the site Failbook.com, over cybersquatting, trademark infringement and copyright infringement. You can see the lawsuit here:
- There never was a copy of the site under our possession, we've embedded the site, it's a common internet practice
- There was no profit on embedding failbooking
- The ads revenue from failbook remained 100% to failbooking
- Failbooking encourages users to share the fails "Put this fail on your blog: (Copy & paste code)", failbook just did so in an automated manner
- There was NO COPY of any copyrighted material
- There was NO ALTERATION of any kind of material, nor removal of copyrights
- Failbook.com was registered on 02/May/2006, the intention on the acquisition of the domain never was to take advantage of failbooking
- The information throughout the lawsuit is misleading, taking advantage of misinterpretation on the use of technology.
Update: Ben Huh chimes in, both in the comments and via email and makes Pet Holding's case thusly:
1) The owner of failbook.com attempted to maximize the sale price of the domain while trying to trick buyers and users into thinking they were at a legitimate Cheezburger Network site. The owner even tweeted about how easy it was to get traffic this way.I'm still not convinced that this is a problem or that any "harm" came to the Cheezburger site. There may, ever so slightly, be a trademark issue if the owner of the Failbook site claimed he was selling a site that was directly a part of Cheezburger/Pet Holdings, but I haven't seen the evidence of that. I could see how a buyer for the site could claim harm against the owner of Failbook, but it's still not clear to me how Cheezburger/Pet Holdings itself was harmed by this or what sort of "fraud" there was. That Failbook tried to capitalize on the situation (and, remember, he owned the domain years before Cheezburger started its site) isn't fraud by itself. I guess I'm still not convinced of why the lawsuit makes sense here.
2) The Cheezburger Network was forced to take swift legal action in an attempt to prevent the fraudulent sale of the site (an auction appeared already under way). The filing of the lawsuit prevents the domain transfer and sale from occurring with the registrar in a way a Cease and Desist cannot.
3) We suffered significant expenses and damages because the owner of failbook.com tried to confuse our users and defraud domain buyers. The owner of failbook.com even marketed his domain in the hopes of capitalizing on the success of Failbooking.com.
We have dealt with many domain disputes amicably in the past. However, this is the most egregious case of fraud we have seen. I think it's very clever for him to try to publicly spin his story, but the facts are very revealing. You're absolutely right in that we're a company that relies on the goodwill of our users and fair use. We seriously considered letting the matter slide until we realized that the owner of failbook.com was trying to sell the domain and purposefully confuse our users. We've also contacted the owner of failbook.com several times in order to reach a reasonable settlement.
Update 2: Here's a pdf showing what Failbook.com looked like, which Pet Holdings claims shows the "fraud," though I still don't see the issue. It's just an iframe of the site. Yes, he's trying to sell the domain name, but all the traffic is still going to Pet Holdings, so I'm not sure what the issue is:
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Filed Under: copyright, failbook, failbooking, framing, icanhascheezburger, trademark
Companies: pet holdings
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I CanHazWarning?
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Re: I CanHazWarning?
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failbooking cracks me up
I never knew of failbook.com, but failbooking.com is always good for a laugh.
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Considering the falseness of the failbook.com owners statements in regards to what he was actually doing with the site, I don't think we can trust any of his statements, including his claim that PHI did not contact him first.
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ICANHAZSTREISANDEFFECT.COM
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Does Copyright Law Promote
Creativity? An Empirical Analysis of
Copyright’s Bounty
http://www.vanderbiltlawreview.org/articles/2009/11/Ku-et-al.-Does-Copyright-Law-Promote-C reativity-62-Vand.-L.-Rev.-1669-2009.pdf
Copyrights as Incentives: Did We Just Imagine That?
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1515964
Real Copyright Reform
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1474929
And you might want to add some of them to your favs.
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Re:
Off topic, yes?
But don't worry, I follow Copycense on Twitter, and saw all three of those postings, so no need to pass them on here. We already wrote about the Litman paper when an earlier draft came out, and the second one isn't up yet so I was waiting for that to come out.
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Does Copyright Law Promote
Creativity? An Empirical Analysis of
Copyright’s Bounty
http://www.vanderbiltlawreview.org/articles/2009/11/Ku-et-al.-Does-Copyright-Law-Promote-C reativity-62-Vand.-L.-Rev.-1669-2009.pdf
Copyrights as Incentives: Did We Just Imagine That?
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1515964
Real Copyright Reform
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1474929
And you might want to add some of them to your favs.
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I think it was justified
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Re: I think it was justified
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Re: Re: I think it was justified
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Re: Re: I think it was justified
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Re: I think it was justified
I'm curious how simply promoting the original site is a misuse of trademark or would cause any damage to goodwill.
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Reply sent.
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Re: Re: I think it was justified
as you've pointed out on this blog yourself many times, the trademark is limited to the field of use... and this embedded site is in the business of giving laughs about people doing stupid things. the embedding site is in the business of domain parking. the second the embedding site tries to reference the other site saying acting like they have some relation, it's trademark infringement, and there's nothing wrong with that.
as for what the law is, both facebook and digg stopped framing other's sites. it's well accepted among trademark attorneys that framing someone else's site is almost always going to be trademark infringement. all cases i can find regarding framing have ended in the framing site settling the case very early, by stopping the practice of framing and paying out an "undisclosed" sum. they usually don't even get to a motion for summary judgment.
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Re: Re: Re: I think it was justified
But how does that harm the embedded site in any way at all? The party who may be damaged by this is the (yet to be found) purchaser of the embedding domain name. It is that purchaser who could seek legal recourse (hopefully after other attempts at recourse prove unfruitful).
There isn't a "trademark" issue here as the "product" being sold (domain name) is not in the same market that the embedded site is selling (web content). It could be argued that for the embedded site "everything is for sale", but that would be a convoluted argument.
If I sold someone the domain name "gooogle.com" (which likely already exists...so don't go there) for $10,000 would Google Inc have legal recourse against me? Google wasn't damaged by that. The buyer, however, could go after me if they can prove that I purposefully deceived them as to what they were actually buying (...and my defense would essentially be "buyer beware").
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Re: Re: I think it was justified
There was an argument above that if failbook sells they are only stealing from the person who buys the domain to but all that traffic failbook gets that was intended for failbooking is goodwill the framed domain loses when you no longer frame or sell the site to someone else. If everyone starts to type failbook instead of failbooking the goodwill of the domain failbooking is now damaged due to the actions of failbook.
Its stupid but that is how it works.
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Re: Re: I think it was justified
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Which came first?
whois failbook.com
Domain Name: FAILBOOK.COM
Created on: 02-May-06
Expires on: 02-May-10
Last Updated on: 11-Jan-10
whois failbooking.com
domain: failbooking.com
created: 30-Dec-2009
last-changed: 20-Jan-2010
registration-expiration: 30-Dec-2010
If there's an abuse of trademark (doubtful, there is no trademark on file for failbooking, and if there was it would probably have been issued in error since failbook was already in use in "this market"), that's not a copyright infringement.
If there's any "passing off" happening it would be facebooking.com trying to "pass off" as the older, simpler domain name.
I don't think facebooking.com has much to stand on here.
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Re: Which came first?
You simply cannot use another person's property or content to sell your own items. That's why we have laws of fraud and copyright infringement.
If Cris were smart, he would send a certified letter to Ben's lawyer and request a meeting face to face. Looking to negotiate can impress a judge. Furthermore, you can get a lot done with a person to person meeting. Plus it will save Cris thousands of dollars in fees.
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Re: Which came first?
That being said, that's not really the case in this instance, since their website is called Failbooking and their domain clearly reflects it, they have no real claim to failbook.com or of trademark infringment... But they never claimed ownership of that domain nor did they claim that their trademark was infringed upon - they only demanded that the domain owner stop piping their work through his domain which is fair enough.
Failbook.com was quite clearly trying to use the popular content on failbooking to add value to a domain so it could be sold on for a higher price. Does anyone here really think they could be asking anywhere in the vicinity of $50k for the domain without the content on failbooking? While this doesn't constitute actual damages to failbooking in of itself, it definitely does impact on goodwill. Many regular readers of the content could reasonably believe that failbook.com is the main website and would certainly be confused when the site they used to visit all-of-a-sudden became a link farm or porn site or some other internet detritus that the highest bidder decided to use it for.
Additionally, Failbook.com may have been simply been framing failbooking.com, however there is nothing stopping them, or anyone else carrying out the same practice, from tacking on advertising, malware or tracking cookies, or any other content that they feel like at any time. You could argue that failbooking should wait until that happens to react but why should it be incumbent on them to monitor other people's sites to make sure they're not up to anything?
Likewise, domain owners like failbook.com might have errors caused by their framing or outages which result in their visitors being unable to see the content properly. If readers believe that failbook.com is the main website, then the effect on goodwill is obvious, and there would be nothing failbooking could do about it. It's completely fair for them to demand the practice stop.
As for the reasoning behind the lawsuit vs a simple C&D... Well if we take Ben's word at face value, then I can understand their response. However given that failbook.com has now rectified the issue, then the law suit could be withdrawn (obviously dependent on the financial damages incurred by Pet Holding as a result). That being said, I have a deep and personal hatred for domain squatters. They're parasites of the internet and are responsible for a good portion of the rubbish floating around the tubes.
Despite his weaseling attempt to fob this off as just innocently passing traffic to failbooking, the owner of failbook.com was transparently attempting to get rich off someone elses work while adding no value to it, and has now found himself on the receiving end of legal action as a result. So let him burn - I'll bring the marshmallows.
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Re: I think it was justified
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Response available
I would like to provide more detail regarding our logic and reasoning for the lawsuit. Please contact me.
Cheers,
Ben
CEO
Cheezburger Network
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Re: Response available
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Re: Response available
A. Love the Fail blog
B. This may be Mike's website, but we're a community here, albeit an odd one. Any particular reason why you can't engage all of us at once here in the comments section?
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Re: Response available
I'm not Mike, but you need to discuss this in public vis-a-vi why you feel this was a necessary step. From my understanding to date, you aren't suffering any damages, gain an audience, and profit thereby. You don't have to give away all you know, just shed some light on why a simple call to them to discuss wasn't an option for you.
I'm willing to listen to your side of the matter, but I can't do that if you won't talk. In light of this, I'm still visiting your sites myself, but if I don't see what I consider a good, valid reason, I'm not visiting your sites anymore and will encourage my friends not to either.
And that would be sad - I enjoy your sites and put up with the ads because I know that's how you pay to keep them up, and hopefully a bit of coin for yourself. However, if you are going to pull something that I consider to be bogus with the level of (non) information I have, I'm not going to give your sites hits anymore, and ask others not to as well.
Thanks for the laughs, and I hope you will discuss with your lawyers what you can say, and post that.
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Re: Response available
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Re: Response available
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What if...
http://www.tech-dirt.com
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Responding via comments vs. to Mike
We'd like our response to receive the same treatment as the original post. If I respond via comments, it won't be syndicated via RSS or email.
Once the post is updated with our response, I am more than happy to answer questions via comments.
P.S. Kudos to TechDirt community for asking for a response. I appreciate that.
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Re: Responding via comments vs. to Mike
And if the response doesn't warrant updating the post? Not saying it doesn't, but we see a great many shall we say questionably useful responses to posts here an elsewhere....
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Re: Re: Responding via comments vs. to Mike
The core matter of why we filed the lawsuit had to do with deception and fraud. (It gets interesting, dunnit?)
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Re: Re: Re: Responding via comments vs. to Mike
Pretty good idea Ben, huh? (see what I did there?)
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Bad Practice
Why don't we all rip off a top site - let's say Mashable - take their entire site, brand, everything, and just post all their stuff on a domain. We won't even have to pay their skilled writers, how awesome is that!
Is that how the internet should work?....
I can own my own Mashable by the end of the week, can't wait!
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Re: Bad Practice
But that's not what happened. It was an embed. Meaning that Failbooking still got all the traffic and all the ad views.
So, yeah, it was kinda awesome.
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Re: Re: Bad Practice
Just to let you know, the first contact from PHI's lawyers that I got (AFTER the lawsuit, and AFTER I uploaded the "letter to the judge") was: "hand over the domain and we'll leave it there". Don't know about you, but sounds rather greedy and abusive for me.
Regards, Cris
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Re: Re: Bad Practice
Also, FYI. note that there are NO ads on Failbooking.com.
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Re: Re: Re: Bad Practice
The traffic I got was direct traffic and "failbook" search traffic. The fact that you've poorly chosen a domain name is not my fault. It was my bad to spend a couple of hour placing the iFrame, and as soon as I realized it was wronging you I stopped.
We should leave it there, don't you think?
Regards, Cris
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Re: Re: Bad Practice
Thus the owner of failbook.com is using failbooking.com content for commercial gain.
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The screenshot of Failbook.com that caused us to file the suit.
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Re: The screenshot of Failbook.com that caused us to file the suit.
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Re: Re: The screenshot of Failbook.com that caused us to file the suit.
Where is the line in the sand?
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Re: The screenshot of Failbook.com that caused us to file the suit.
The only disagreement I have with this entire thing is the settlement. $8,000? The owner of the site had to trick people just to purchase the domain, I douby he carries too much money. I understand that a punishment is in order but $8,000 is just greedy! Even if you wish to set an example, I feel this is just ... pushing it. Really pushing it.
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Re: The screenshot of Failbook.com that caused us to file the suit.
This all seems childish to me. All the traffic was sent to failbooking.com anyway. It only boosted your traffic. But that's stealing your material by rerouting traffic to your site? I see it is not proper in the way he presented your site, however, from the medias point of view, it seems you didn't even bother to contact him before jumping down his throat. I do not see why you needed to stop a DOMAIN sale. The framing of your site without permisson, yes. But his domain sale, no. Your lawsuit seems backwards to me as you don't care about the framing, only his domain sale. It seems to me with the media coverage on this, that you didn't even bother to ask for him to stop before pressing legal action. That is very poor business taste. If you had good business sense you wouldn't have let this hit mainstream media and kept this quite if possible. I used to be a fan of your cheezburger network, not anymore knowing how you choose to run it.
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How about fordcars.com actually framing toyota.com? Or to take it a step further, WeMurderAnimalsForFun.com framing peta.org? ChildRaper.com framing your personal blog? Sure, there are defamation angles there, but it's the same basic idea.
I don't see how framing someone else's site would be legal. True, there's no "physical" copy of the files in your possession, but you're still passing someone else's complete work off as your own, or at least muddying the waters on whose it is.
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Re:
"So there would be no problem if I bought amazonny.com fifteen years ago, later framed amazon.com on the domain (so going to amazonny.com appears to be amazon.com's home page), building up traffic, then trying to sell the domain for $500k by saying "I get 2 million users a month on this domain"?" Well yes you could do that, but only a fool entering the web site business sector would fall for that idea that you owned amazon. There are numerous flags that any web developer looking for a domain would clearly see when attempting to purchase the domain. The first being its a DOMAIN and not the SITE. To which any web developer with a head on his shoulders would ask questions and realize whats going on. If you don't know how the web works, please don't try to get overly involved in things you know nothing of.
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What's Obvious
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Someone pass the popcorn, please.
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Re:
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Can't we all just get along?
Ben, it would seem that Mr. Castillo seems to think as long as he no longer iFrame's, there's no reason to proceed with the lawsuit.
"It was my bad to spend a couple of hour placing the iFrame, and as soon as I realized it was wronging you I stopped.
We should leave it there, don't you think?"
As long as he puts that into (legal) writing, what more would you require to drop the lawsuit?
As Mike points out, it doesn't seem that he's really hurting your brand at all, or defrauding you. Just trying to defraud whoever buys his domain name, which shouldn't affect you at all.
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Re: Can't we all just get along?
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Message to @benhuh
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Re: Message to @benhuh
Ben has already paid for a lawyer to file suit, he will want to recoup that. Bottom line you must realize is that you simply cannot walk away without having to pay something.
It's unfortunate, but settling for reasonable amount now is key to your livelihood. Believe me, the stress on having a pending lawsuit is not worth it, especially when you know they have damning evidence.
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Yes. That's completely true. So what? There's no evidence this has occurred, and if it did, the problem would lie between the owner of failbook.com and the potential buyer! Why should Ben Huh be playing internet policeman, here? What if I bought a domain "jokester.com", put up a screenshot of "jokes.com" and an estimation of the monthly ad revenue of "jokes.com"? And said "hey, buy my domain, you could make your investment back quickly if you made a jokes site only one-tenth as popular as this other, similar jokes site." Would I be committing a crime? Would you be ready to throw the thought-crime book at me? (cybersquatting, copyright, trademark, etc) Bit hypocritical for this crowd, don't you think?
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Caveat emptor
A much "cooler" response would've been to put some banner at the top saying "Welcome to Failbooking.com. If you are seeing this through another web site be aware that the web site you are visiting does not own or control what your are looking at."
If Failbooking.com could directly detect visitors visiting via a frame, they could substitute the actual content with "Please click here to visit Failbooking.com."
The latter would immediately neutralize any commercial benefit to anyone iFraming the site.
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Re: Caveat emptor
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Why would this domain have a $50,000 price? What defines it's value?
After all, if you remove the iframed content, it is just another "reg fee" domain.
Mike, why do you think the domain would be worth more than a registration fee?
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Re:
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Re: Re:
Plus there are quite a few sites on the market already that generate decent content like lamebook.com and lolonmywall.com
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Re: Mikey
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in that case, the price is a steal. now not all URL buyers are idiots but as the internet has taught us, not all buyers are geniuses either.
was a law suit the way to go? i dunno, i ain't no lawyer, i'm a rocket scientist (and there ain't no rockets on that site). but it is plainly obvious that the failbook.com guy is playing a game, implying some sort of link to or branding or what not with the cheezburger site. a link that does not exist.
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Re:
Even if Cris didn't realize he was breaking the law and feels no harm was done or even if the public feels no harm was done, Ben would still be protected from this type of crime.
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Re: Re:
Except, they don't.
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Re: Re: Re:
Except, that it most certainly does.
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Re: Re:
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Netiquette
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Re: Netiquette
Should googol.com link to google.com (the current parking page you get directed to from googol.com has a search box even!)?
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So you have a domain name thats just sitting there doing a bunch of nuthin' and along comes a website with a very similar name except that it's actually an OK website. You see an opportunity to profit from the sale of your own domain by making your site look as if it is the other website. It's a clever idea, although shady, unethical, and very possibly illegal. It's great that it generated traffic for the "real" site, but it was done with the intention of increasing traffic to your own failbook.com by using the popularity of a more successful website, failbooking.com. You then attempted to use that traffic to sell failbook.com, possibly to failbooking.com but more likely to one of those shady advertising websites that people accidentally hit when they misspell the domain name. What you attempted to do is scammy at best. Enjoy the litigation.
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ben: you've aggressively defended your trademark, cris has amitted the errors of his ways; now would be the right time to back away graciously. doing otherwise will damage what was an impressive net reputation
oh, and lamebook is better.
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Re:
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So let me understand
I usually defend you, Mike, because you are usually a right-thinking person, but I'm baffled that you can't see the problem here.
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You REALLY cannot see the potential fraud here?
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Re: You REALLY cannot see the potential fraud here?
"I deal with executive clients every day, and not all of them are that internet savvy or bother with 'little details'..." And you probably have something to do with bothering with little details for them, right?
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A weird case
Since failbook was registered in 2006, it looks like it was just trying to be a parody of facebook that never got implemented. One could assume they were trying to capitalize on failblog.org, but that wasn't registered until 2008.
Since failbooking.com is just an imitation of other sites like lamebook.com, I have a hard time getting worked up about failbook.com's supposed stealing failbooking's content--especially since it wasn't stolen. It seems clear to me that Pet Holdings wanted failbook.com but didn't want to pay the price. Pet Holdings is the only company that really knows how valuable failbook.com is because it's supposedly getting traffic that's intended for failbooking.com. Since failbook.com was just framing failbooking.com and all the traffic was going to failbooking, the real risk that Pet Holding faced is that one day failbook would either, 1) decide to point somewhere else, or even worse, 2) follow Pet Holding's lead and do a lamebook.com imitation. In that case, Pet Holding would lose the traffic that was going to the infinitely better domain name. Rather than negotiate, Pet Holdings decided to take the nuclear option, file a lawsuit, and use their deep pockets to force the transfer of the infinitely better domain name. Pet Holdings is obviously the slimy one in this case. They ripped off other people's ideas now they're trying to take someone's domain. The calculus is simple: pay $10,000 to $15,000 in attorney's fees or $50,000 for the domain. If you win the lawsuit, you not only save a lot of money on the domain, you also increase your reputation in the online community as one who is willing to drop loads of cash to get your way.
The idea that failbook.com was going to increase there traffic and then sell the domain to an unsuspecting buyer who didn't realize that the domain didn't include the content is crazy. I realize there are lots of unsophisticated people out there, but I don't think those people are paying $50,000 for a domain w/out knowing there's no content behind it. If they are, they can post about it on fmylife.com. And if they do, I'll vote "you deserved it." (Hmm, I wonder if Pet Holdings going to launch FingMyLife.com or fmylifeblog.com?)
I really wish failbook.com had been more than a stub. I would have liked to have seen them go after failbooking to see if they could get the domain.
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Li-Giddy Up!
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This is WHy LawSuits are CraZy
We can't have people filing lawsuits just to pick on the weak. Just my opinion.
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Framing eh?
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Are you an idiot? What failbook.com did is COPYING AND ALL POSTS from failbooking.com using program. This is NOT called framing and DO NOT bring traffic ti failbooking.com.
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I think its like this:
Boy accidently steps on bully's shoelaces. Bully thinks he was hurt so he punches the boy in the face and takes his lunch money. Bully feels good.
Just my opinion.
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one person's perception
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Seems Obvious To Me
- Person A (Ben) owns some intellectual property.
- Person B (Cris) has a piece of property that he would like to sell (a domain name) and uses Person A's property, without permission, for the purpose of advertising it.
In other words, Person B is using Person A's property for financial gain without permission. I'm pretty sure that is not lawful.
In my mind, the analogous situation would be a television commercial. Imagine Person B were trying to sell his property through television advertising. He would not be allowed to use intellectual property--music, audio, video, etc.--without permission of the owner.
How and why is this case any different?
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Random thought
My defense: after purchasing the lot you could build an equivalent house on it and your house was chosen only for reference.
No, that doesn't sound shady to me at all.
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Get a Life, you're Just greedy and want the better domain name.
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Re: Get a Life, you're Just greedy and want the better domain name.
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Re: Re: Get a Life, you're Just greedy and want the better domain name.
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In this view cheezburgers arguments make good sense!
think about it
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That's the problem with that, the lawsuit is fair and I win.
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Re:
{http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/usc_sec_15_00008131----000-.html}
Complain all you want, but Cheezburger is in the right here, according to the law. They tried to settle, asking only for lawyer/ court fees and the domain address, but Christian refused, and claims he's done nothing wrong. Simply put, he's wrong.
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Re: Re: Re:
It doesn't matter who was around first, it matters who created the material. He copied it, using failbooking's creative content, and then tried to sell the domain for profit. Purely illegal, I've already posted a link to the actual law.
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Lawyers at the cockroaches of the world.
A "Cease and Desist" would have been just fine.
The legal discussions on here are interesting, I guess. But really it just shows there's always some used car (issue) for some used car salesmen (lawyer) to profit from. This particular overreactive case shows how dishonorable law and lawyers are and overly greedy businessmen can be.
The only people who are benefitting from this case are the parasites in suits sitting behind the "law" desk.
Ben your brand is permanently tarnished from your greedy overreaction and Cris, regardless if you did this to be schiesty or not - a simple Cease and Desists would have been the "not a totally fekin greedy, wall street tool, parasitic behavior" way to go about this.
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Better reaction
That looks ugly.
A funner solution (and one that doesn't affect the appearance to normal visitors) would be to use javascript to check if the site is embeded in a frame, and if it is, show something offensive.
Maybe use a blacklist and if the site is embedded in a blacklist site, flash up a big warning, or, i dont know... a huge dong or something.
if (window!=top){
//load pic of huge peen here.
}
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re:Everyone's Post
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But it doesn't absolve Ben from his actions. If it's true that there was no contact before the lawsuit, that disgusts me. He should have at least acted like an adult and sent an email or something first; the whole matter might have been resolved quickly and quietly. Again, the only reason I can see for him acting like a child and "tattling" on Cris is because now he wants to sue and win ownership of the failblog domain name.
Quite frankly, I think they're both greedy jerks, and I really might give up my addiction to failblog if Ben goes through with this ridiculous lawsuit.
Drop the lawsuit. Sell the domain name to a third party at a REASONABLE price. Have it be over with.
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Ben was justified
A cease-and-decist letter would not have stopped to proposed auction of failbook.com. Ben had to sue to put a stop to it.
Now, as far as embedding is concerned, Christian broke the law. You cannot copy another company's work to your own site for profit. That is illegal, you can look it up lol. Ben is right to sue; this guy just copied all of his company's work to his site and then tried to make money off of it! You can't sell someone else's work. That's plain wrong, and illegal.
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Re: Ben was justified
Yeah, because you can prove that...
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Re: Re: Ben was justified
So yes, I just proved it.
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Christian did not make a copy of another company's work for his own profit, all he did was display someone else's work in an exemplary manner.
The "for profit" actions by Christian, selling the domain, very clearly state that the content on the site was not included in the sale.
The only leg Ben has to stand on is if somewhere Chris claimed he was affiliated with the Cheezburger network. If he flat out said, "own your piece of the Cheezburger network now." In that case, his actions would fall under "passing off" or damage to goodwill.
I've yet to see Chris actually do that. Do I think what he did was moral or right? Absolutely not - but I don't believe his actions were illegal, by any means.
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Re:
"Any person who registers a domain name that consists of the name of another living person, or a name substantially and confusingly similar thereto, without that person’s consent, with the specific intent to profit from such name by selling the domain name for financial gain to that person or any third party, shall be liable in a civil action by such person."
(The law associates "person" to mean any person, company, or organization capable of suing or being sued)
Christian was using Pet Holdings' content without their permission and then tried to profit off of it. It's not fraud, it's basically copyright infringement.
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How is this so hard?
... for his own profit.
He displayed someone else's content to generate page views and generate prospective buyers. This is open and closed. This guy's screwed for abusing the system, and he deserves it.
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Real potential for damage to PHI.
Look, if I made a site called techdirts.com and framed this site, what's the harm to Techdirt? None apparently. Even if I later sold techdirts.com, is techdirt directly injured? Not financially, no. But now, months and months later, I've built but a significant amount of traffic who are going to techdirts.com based on the content in techdirt.com. I've done no work what so ever, but hundreds of people have bookmarked or linked to techdirts.com.
Now, tomorrow I launch my new techdirts.com site with it's own content completely separate from what's on this site. I throw up some new graphics, new info, new articles. Put a big sign up that says: Welcome to the newly redesigned TechDirts.com! That way everyone understands things are a bit different and not worried that it doesn't seem like quite the same site. I've just stolen hundreds of users of techdirt.
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Happened here too
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No, no, no...
A cease and desist certainly would have been enough. It would have been quiet & easy, and no huge debate would have sprung from it. PHI just wanted to make a scene, I guess.
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failbooking.com
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My side of the story
A few years back I bought the domain name failbook.com because I had an idea. As usual, the time went by and the idea wasn’t implemented, slowly I forgot about the domain.
At the end of last year I was doing a recount of forgotten projects, and remembered about this domain I had. As I saw the traffic stats I decided that it was a good time to develop the platform, since the direct traffic was doubling every month.
While I was still in the creation process, I realized that the Ch**zburger Network (don’t want to mess with copyrights here, you may already know why) had already implemented a similar idea.
In my situation, where other profitable projects already consume my time, I decided not to pursue the development of failbook.com as a heavy competitor was already in place. My decision (and HUGE mistake) was to place C**zburger’s site on an iFrame to show what the site could be used for, and place a price tag on the domain.
Everything went smooth at the beginning, until a few days later (not more than a couple of weeks) I did a search on twitter and realized there was legal action in process, two days later the domain was blocked and my domain auction was closed by GoDaddy.
At the beginning, and since they were suing John Doe, I thought it was just a way to call my attention. Unaware of the work ethics of the Ch**ezburger people, I thought they only wanted me to stop framing the site, so I did it with a humorous “Message to the Judge” in the homepage, and a contact mail.
Few days latter Venkat Balasubramani from Focal (Ch**zburger’s lawyers) called me and basically told me “My client is willing to let this matter slide if you hand over the domain” (I’m skimming legal and monetary slangy threats). I refused, told him that if they wanted the domain I could sell it to them, he asked me for a price and told me he would talk with his client.
Few days latter I received a call from Ben Huh (I didn’t know of his existence before this point), he asked for a price and as I told him that $50,000 was final because I could make it worth $200,000 developing the site, he flips out and tells me that, if I end with control of the domain he would make sure that it becomes useless for me.
Trying to prove the point that I didn’t mean to harm his project, and that most of the damages he was claiming (if not all) was due to his response, and not contacting me directly before any legal action I offered to pay his $3,000 legal bill if he just let me keep my domain and drop the suit.
I was expecting a settlement under this lines (or an offer for the domain), but what I get instead is this. A settlement where I have to pay $8,095 AND can’t use the domain for anything, as expected, I did not accept. Got a call from Venkat, I tell him that the settlement wasn’t anywhere near what I expected, that I had to think for a while before giving a reply. To date no one, not Focal’s team nor Ben respond my attempts to contact them.
For a moment, I decided it was only a mistake from my part, as it was from their and that we would just let this matter slide. But yesterday, as I read WIRED’s article about Ben, where you can see his modus operandi in business, I realized this was not a mistake on their side.
They builded a case from day one in order to get control of the domain, and I will not let it go without a fight.
Let the games begin,
Cristian Castillo A.K.A. John Doe
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Re: My side of the story
I'm not a lawyer, but honestly dude I think you should quit while you're ahead. But that's just my advice.
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It's caturday!
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Ben Huh
Stolen so much of his junk from 4chan, the unoriginal twat.
He is a complete tool.
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Faecesbook
Actually, maybe I shouldn't, given the above!
FWIW, Ben has always seemed to me to be a good guy. Met him a couple of years ago when he was just starting up the sites and seemed genuine. Hope all those burgers haven't made him evil like basement cat. I'll be watching with interest.
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I can see that anyone who is a moron and shouldnt run/operate/buy a domain name could get confused and think they were buying the actual website, but this is morbidly idiodic on Huh's side.
Failbooking.com is only hurting themselves by getting bad publicity but its cause of this that i checked them out and gave them a few clicks so i guess any publicity is good publicity.
also Icanhazcheezburger sucks and is a sad excuse for people who dont go to 4chan or any of the other chans to look at cat pictures and add their own stupid captions that arent nearly as good.
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ben is a douche bag
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Usual Javascript
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