Shopzilla Threatens To Sue Site For 3 Year Old Neutral Link To Shopzilla... Then Apologizes

from the but-did-they-fire-their-lawyer? dept

Wed, Apr 24th 2013 11:15am — Mike Masnick

I really thought we were past the days when lawyers would send out cease and desists over linking, but that's what happened last week to Datadial, who received a legal nastygram from Shopzilla, arguing that the mention of Shopzilla with a three year old link to the site was infringing on both copyright and trademark law. Datadial exaggerates a bit, and claims that they're being "sued" for linking, but it doesn't appear any actual lawsuit was filed, just the threat letter was sent. Still, that letter is crazy. The mention of Shopzilla certainly is neither copyright nor trademark infringement. It was just a listing of a link of "other product review sites" because Datadial was doing a review of a competing site. Thus, the legal threat makes less than no sense. It was just a link. There's nothing infringing about it.

The "good" news to come out of this is that the folks at Shopzilla quickly responded and insisted that the letter was sent in mistake. Shopzilla's VP of Operations, David Bixler responded in the comments:

I'm terribly sorry you received the letter from our attorney's office. We appreciate that your site is not a spam site and is not mis-using our trademark. We flag up thousands of backlinks that are potentially spam and unfortunately your site slipped through our filter. Please disregard the notice...

That's a semi-decent response, but not really. Links alone are not infringing. Even if they're worried about backlinks, that doesn't mean they get to abuse the law even just to take down backlinks that may be judged as spam. Furthermore, they suggest that this "slipping through" is just a minor accident, though if I were them, I'd be looking for a (much) better lawyer -- because anyone sending cease and desist letters based on that obviously non-infringing use is billing too much money.

That said, Shopzilla did do one cool thing. In the original post, Datadial joked that the threat made the original author sit down and eat a Twix bar and drink some wine, and they asked Shopzilla to pay for the food, saying the consumption of it was brought on by stress from the threat. In response, Shopzilla sent them a bottle of wine and a box of Twix. That part was nicely handled, though it still seems problematic that any of this ever happened at all.

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Companies: datadial, shopzilla

18 Comments

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silverscarcat (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 9:42am

Well...
At least there was an apology.

Even if this shouldn't have happened in the first place.
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Ninja (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 10:03am

Re: Well...
For twix and wine? Yes, please threaten me!
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 11:26am

Links alone are not infringing.

Willfully blind, as per usual. A link can make the linker liable as an indirect infringer, Mike. Why ignore reality? I know you don't like it, but lying about it doesn't make it go away.
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Designerfx (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 11:34am

Re:
This is hilarious. Do you write newsletters or something with that crazy, AC?
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 11:40am

Re:
Considering we're talking about links *to the site* complaining about infringing, I'm afraid Mike isn't the one lying.
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 11:44am

Re:
Willfully blind, as per usual. A link can make the linker liable as an indirect infringer

That is an entirely different issue, to do with linking to infringing content.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 12:00pm

Re: Well...
Of course, if it weren't something that shouldn't have happened in the first place, then there would be no need to apologize.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 12:06pm

Re:
Spend a day vrowsing the web at ransom, and determine the copyright status and owner for every piece of information, including files and images. Note, copyright status include licensed for use. If you can do that you can claim linkers are wilfully blind.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 12:10pm

Re:
Indirect infringer eh?

There is no such thing (at least there should not be), a link is a link, it means nothing without the content it links to. The content is what is infringing (and that's questionable too), the link is merely an address. Of course for the big media companies, they cant be bothered with that, they just spam Google with DMCA notices for every link on the page, hoping to, I don't know, crash their servers.
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out_of_the_blue, 24 Apr 2013 @ 12:28pm

Yet another mistake twisted by Mike to attack copyright.
"Even if they're worried about backlinks, that doesn't mean they get to abuse the law even just to take down backlinks that may be judged as spam." -- It's not an abuse of the law to threaten suit against a spammer. Mike apparently sides with spammers too.

And it may be a PR stunt. Who ever heard of either before?

Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up same place!
http://techdirt.com/
Where Mike Monetizes Mania.
08:27:55[j-730-1]
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 12:40pm

The real question is
How has Shopzilla not been sued by Toho?
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Apr 2013 @ 12:51pm

Re: Yet another mistake twisted by Mike to attack copyright.
Here comes the banhammer...
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That One Guy (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 2:16pm

Re: Re: Yet another mistake twisted by Mike to attack copyright.
So such thing on this site, other than when dealing with spam-bots. TD's version of the banhammer is simply the report button, putting the power to hide comments the readers object to in the hands of the readers.
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That One Guy (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 2:20pm

Re: Re: Re: Yet another mistake twisted by Mike to attack copyright.
*No such thing
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Spaceman Spiff (profile), 24 Apr 2013 @ 4:54pm

Everyone screws up at times
It isn't the screwup (usually) that is a problem (sometimes), but how you deal with it. It sounds like Shopzilla handled this pretty well, and though it remains to be seen if they clean up their act, their overall behavior makes me hopeful that they will stop acting like bullies.
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Anonymous Coward, 25 Apr 2013 @ 1:28am

Not again!
I'm sick of hearing these "whoops, sorry, our legal department went overboard" excuses from misbehaving companies. I want a full explanation of exactly what caused this!
What the heck was Shopzilla doing?! What do they mean by "spam site"? What is "flag up thousands of backlinks that are potentially spam" even supposed to mean?!

The closest thing to a logical explanation I can come up with is that Shopzilla runs a bot that looks for link farms or content farms based on some sort of (apparently flawed) algorithm and sends a legal nastygram to any such site that links to Shopzilla. I guess it gets site owners' e-mail addresses via WHOIS or something?

Of course, that's not technically a logical explanation, since I'm not sure what exactly they'd gain from doing that, and besides, last I heard Google was downranking those farms into irrelevance. Does anyone know what's actually going on with Shopzilla?
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Pete Austin, 25 Apr 2013 @ 1:54am

This is not unusual
My company was involved in a similar incident when we added integration with a fast moving eCommerce vendor to our system, at the request of a mutual customer, and mentioned the support on our Website.

Although this could only benefit them, because we already supported their competitors, their lawyers sent a similar letter to the one in this post. I assumed that the lawyers were using an automated system and that whoever had checked the results before sending out letters had simply made a mistake.

We reacted by cutting back by re-focussing our marketing to help users of different ecommerce systems, because the cost of dealing with companies that communicate via their lawyers is higher.
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Anders Nielsen (profile), 25 Apr 2013 @ 1:55am

Re: Re: Re: Yet another mistake twisted by Mike to attack copyright.
When you get above 100 posts and 99% of them is reported, I think it's time to get the GTFO hammer.
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