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Im surprised that blockshopper settled out of court here.

I had a similar experience, with regard to unpaid domains from a place I was doing contract work for.

When the bills went unpaid, I posted a link to the county courthouse that listed all the current and pending cases said company had against it.

Almost a year later, I got what is best known as a "Cease and Desist" letter in the mail from an attorney. The letter claimed all sorts of things, that I was knowingly committing libel, along with trademark and copyright violations as well. The threats included if I did not comply were restraining orders, fines, and CRIMINAL charges being filed against me.

So what did I do? I never responded to the letter, and I posted the letter on my website, for all to read. So now, something that had about 1-2 hits a month, went up to being seen by 10,000+ people. And the lawyer who attached himself to this attempt, is forever associated with it.

You can read the incompetent attempt at a Cease and Desist Letter here. The company who felt this was an ethical approach was Caton Commercial

And now, one year later, I have not heard a single response to that letter. Although, in all honesty I wish that I could have gone into a court room, and heard the lawyer who wrote that letter try to explain his case to a judge that the county was publishing libelous information by posting the schedule of its own cases online publicly.

Its amazing how often this kind of thing happens, and I think the only reasonable response to this kind of behavior is to PUBLISH it.

I did some contract work for a company once, and during the course of the work, found out that there were quite a few court cases against them in my local county. I decided to stop any further business dealings with them.

After not being paid for services rendered, I posted a link to our local county courthouse showing all the court cases they were currently involved in.

About 9 months later, I got a letter in the mail from an attorney, claiming all sorts of things like you described; libel, copyright, and CRIMINAL violations. The letter however was addressed to someone else in the phonebook of my small town who had the same last name as myself. I only received it after it had been sent back to the post office numerous times for an incorrect address. It should be pointed out here, that at no point was I trying to hide my identity or make it confusing as to exactly who was posting this court information. At this point it became obvious the level of professionalism I was dealing with that wouldnt even do the most basic fact checking on their accusations. The wording of this letter seemingly bordered on blackmail. To make a long story short, I posted the threatening letter for everyone to read, and havent heard another peep since.

The company who did this was the small real estate company, Caton Commercial. You can also read the Cease and Desist Letter they sent.

It honestly amazes me that a business would send such a spurious letter to someone who is already publishing the questionable ethical practices of said company. And yes, now when you search their company name, Caton Commercial in a search engine, the second result is the courthouse website listing their cases, and the third is a copy of that letter. I cant imagine that was the intended result they were after, when they first had the idea to intimidate someone for publishing already public court information.

So, if I link the name of a specific company, say Caton Commercial, to a website of the courthouse of the county they are located in, that shows their current court cases, that would be an acceptable use of hyper-linking?

I just want to make sure, so that they aren't able to craft some sort of streisand-effect based Cease and Desist letter that would make them look unprofessional.

Yes, its called a 'google bomb'.

Check upthread where the technique is used to link to a county courthouse website list of cases, by including the link of the company for the text.

Caton Commercial

Not surprisingly, when you do a google search for 'caton commercial' the second result(for me, may differ by geography) is a link to the courthouse, with the 'title' of the link being caton commercial.

P.S. It helps greatly if your linked text, is actually in the page you are linking to somewhere.

Now go have yourself some fun ;)

Well, Ive had the same experience. A local real estate company sent me a Cease and Desist Letter in regard to domains that they wanted, but did not want to offer compensation for.

The letter consisted of threatening to sue me, file CRIMINAL charges against me, and restraining orders. It also bordered on libel, as it stated for a fact that owning these domains was libelous and slanderous, without any court of law coming to that finding. The company who hired the, in my opinion, unethical attorney to send this letter was Caton Commercial

Since they sent that letter, and I published it on-line for my lawyer to read, the results seem to have been that their company name 'Caton Commercial' now comes up with the second result in google pointing to the Will County website which lists all the current and pending legal cases they are involved in personally, and because of their business practices.

Is there something about real estate where the blinders to the outside world are so intense, that they stop the line of thought the prevents a company from considering the 'law of unintended consequences'?

Well, Ive had the same experience. A local real estate company sent me a Cease and Desist Letter in regard to domains that they wanted, but did not want to offer compensation for.

The letter consisted of threatening to sue me, file CRIMINAL charges against me, and restraining orders. It also bordered on libel, as it stated for a fact that owning these domains was libelous and slanderous, without any court of law coming to that finding. The company who hired the, in my opinion, unethical attorney to send this letter was Caton Commercial

Since they sent that letter, and I published it on-line for my lawyer to read, the results seem to have been that their company name 'Caton Commercial' now comes up with the second result in google pointing to the Will County website which lists all the current and pending legal cases they are involved in personally, and because of their business practices.

Is there something about real estate where the blinders to the outside world are so intense, that they stop the line of thought the prevents a company from considering the 'law of unintended consequences'?

I know someone who works in the court clerk's office of my county, and I can rattle off hundreds of examples of this.

One of the more notable ones was a real estate agent who came into the court and was upset that her case, and arrest, for DUI was posted online on the court schedule. Demands were made that this information not be published because the person was worried about how it would affect their reputation. I honestly dont think it ever occured to them to avoid the actual driving while intoxicated to avoid that damaged reputation. Only the publishing of that information was what was the problem.

Closer to home, I had posted a listing of all the court cases of a local real estate agency. Some of them arbitration cases, and some of them small claims cases. All that was posted was an exact copy of the information from the court website. This was up for about 6 months when I received a letter from an attorney DEMANDING I take the information down because it was 'making knowingly libelous claims'.

It gets worse. In the Cease and Desist letter, the demands were for me to turn over my domain names to this company free of charge, or they were going to move forward with criminal charges against me. Needless to say, I ignored the letter. Suprisingly, I never heard from them again. But that might be because I decided to post the nice Cease and Desist letter online that was sent by Caton Commercial. I can only imagine the point at which they realized that it might have been a bad idea to bring MORE attention to what they were trying to keep hidden.

To this very day, simply typing in the company name "Caton Commercial" into Google, returns the courthouse website and schedule with all their cases listed in the #2 spot. The 'streisand effect' is a beautiful thing to watch unfold sometimes. If you doubt the story, you can always type it in and see for yourself.

Well, unfortunately, these people are REPRESENTING a certain portion of our population. Its not mature, no, but this is the behavior certain groups of people have chosen to reward.

Its simply a reflection of the place this country has become. Somehow, that when everything doesnt go exactly the way you want it, the only available option is to complain and point at the other guy for being 'at fault'.

Take a situation for example, of a company who is involved in quite a few small claims, and arbitration cases. A third party then publishes the information that is made available on the local county court website regarding this(PUBLIC INFO). What does the company do? Caton Commercial decided to send a Cease and Desist letter claiming that publishing this information was libel. And now what happens? When typing in their company name 'Caton Commercial' into google, the second entry is for the link to the courthouse webiste listing all the case schedules.

The point being, that sometimes drawing attention to yourself in such extremely overboard displays, sometimes has whats best known as 'unintended consequences'. Granted, logically thinking through such a response would have prevented this company, or the republicans, from looking like children. But thats rarely the case when a damaged ego is looking for retribution.

The other favored method these days seems to be sending out non-sensical Cease and Desist Letters claiming all sorts of things, including copyright infringement, and CRIMINAL charges because someone has a domain that you want.

Caton Commercial engages in this, and seems to find this practice acceptable.

I appreciate the views that others have of the real estate industry that are similar to what I saw while working as the IT grunt for a small real estate company. And yes, I heard the exact phrase 'the internet is just a fad' and IT was just a waste of money. The babysitting eventually got old for me, and I came to realize that I had to leave, because the people in charge just dont 'get it'. Not in a bad way, just in a 'my grandparents still listen to music on AM radio' kinda way.

There is no other industry I have seen that is so absurdly protectionist in its business practices. And the result of that type of worldview has led some real estate companies to be literal fossilized relics of their time.

This settlement gives me great pleasure to finally see, as the roadblocks setup by MLS are some of the most frustrating I have ever encountered, from the buyers point of view.

Having seen the industry from the inside, I would never have any part of buying or selling a home through a real estate agent. If I see a house thats for sale that I want, I am patient enough to let the rediculous 'listing agreement' expire, and then buy it right from the seller directly. It is amazing how eager people will become to sell to you when they realize that waiting a few months can net them a 7% larger profit.

And what ever happened to that small real estate company, you may ask? Well Caton Commercial spends some of its time showing up to court cases brought against them by various old employees and business partners, and sending out threatening Cease and Desist letters to other old employees.

Its amazing how common this practice is these days.

For some reason, when I posted the publicly available court cases for my county, a local real estate company hired a lawyer to send me a letter demanding that I remove this as it was 'possibly libelous'.

There were also claims of copryright, and trademark violations in the letter. Along with threatening me to have the information tunred over for possible CRIMINAL charges. Keep in mind these sites did not sell any product, or service of any kind.

Oh, it also demanded that I turn over my legally owned domains to the lawyers client, free of charge.

The company who did this was Caton Commercial, and yes that is a link to the current pending cases against them at my county courthouse. And also, the Cease and Desist Letter can also be read online.

What a pathetic way to run a business, or conduct yourself with respect to others differing views.

dont forget...

Screw You Caton Commercial for sending ignorant Cease and Desist Letters too! :)

Seriously, anyone can send you any letter they want. There is no requirement for it to be based on truth.

I received one of these demand letters a few months back. In it, a commercial company was demanding that I turn over domain names that I owned legally, to them because of claims of trademark infringement. Nevermind that the domains didnt point to a website that actually sold any commercial product or service of any kind to base a claim of trademark upon. The company that sent the letter was Caton Commercial

After talking with a handful of lawyers to see what my rights were, it basically boiled down to all of them telling me what I told you in the first sentence.

"All you have there is an angry letter from people who sent it to you because they themselves know that a court of law would not uphold their claims, and are hoping for you to make a decision in their benefit because you are scared."

Me personally, I just ignored the letter and plan to let the domains expire since they are worthless to me in the first place. If this company is so interested in the domains, they can buy them with their own money. I sure dont plan to give them away for free as the letter demanded.

While it is unfortunate that such things as SSN's are being made public, the hard reality is that anything contained in a court record is public information.

Open access to government is a two way street, and is meant to prevent corruption and give the public a clear view what their government is doing.

On a side note, my county also publishes court records on the internet that are public information. However, it is limited to the court schedule, case#, charge, and attorney schedule.

The fact that this schedule is public information is still not a concept some people are aware of. Ive heard stories from court employees of upset people coming in and demanding that their DUI case be taken down from being publicly viewable. Unfortunately for these people, the law says otherwise.

I even have personal experience in some of the reactions people have to this publicly available information after I posted a link to the county courthouse on one of my websites. A Company called Caton Commercial even went to far as to have their attorney draft a cease and desist letter threatening me with legal action, and demanding that I remove this linked information, and turn over my legal domains to them to stop this 'knowingly libelous' action. Although, Im not sure that they thought through how they were going to present to a judge their case that the courts own website schedule was the source of this so-called libelous information. Like every other company before that has failed to grasp the concept of the internet, all the attention this brought to the linked information was a lovely demonstration of the 'Streisand Effect'. Once again, adding more weight to the phrase 'more dollars than sense'.

I also had a nice 'cease and desist' letter sent to me. Other than trying to suggest that I would be brought up on unspecified criminal charges(yes, criminal), the letter also mentioned copyright and trademark violations that I was being accused of violating. Actually, in one sentence of the letter it accused me of making possibly libelous statements, and in almost the very next sentence, it accused me of knowingly making libelous statements. Granted, by this point I already knew the letter was just thrown together with the amount of thought it takes to blink an eye, as the location this letter was addressed to was not mine, but someone else in my town with the same last name. I would guess that after the post office sent it back to them, they finally found the correct information, even though it was in the WHOIS records for the domains the entire time.

I had a nice response letter written out, and had it reviewed by more than one other attorney. And more than one time was advised that the less I said to them, the better. In the end I figured that sending this letter would be showing my hand, and since I knew what I was doing was in no way illegal, or libelous, I made the decision to not send the letter.

By the way, the company who sent this letter, and then demanded I transfer my rights to the domain to them, was Caton Commercial, a real estate company. Being that the content of the sites in question contained linked information that was directly shown on the county courthouse website, I thought it would be better to not tip my hand. In my state, we have what are known as Anti-SLAPP laws, which provide for the awarding of court fees to the defendant in any case which attempts to supress the publishing of public government information.

In the end, I thought it would just be easier to publish the letter online. It amazes me how people could try such underhanded tactics in this day and age, knowing full well how easy it is for the recipient to publish it online for all to see.

I imagine the attorney who wrote this knows all of this, and was just trying to make his clients happy and stop bothering him, since it has now been over 60 days since the original letter was written and sent(to the wrong address) and I have not heard any more from them in regard to this .

I was the recipient of a nice cease and desist letter that involved publicly available content that was posted on some about to expire domains.

Caton Commercial was the company involved. The claim in the letter was that by publishing this already public, government information, that I was making knowingly slanderous statements. (Or possibly slanderous, depending on which sentence you read in the ill-formed letter). The cease and desist letter can be read here