Google sued as PetsWarehouse Lawsuit Continues.

Ikari Gendou writes "In April, Slashdot reported that Robert Novak, owner of Internet pet store Pets Warehouse filed a $15,000,000US lawsuit against several individuals who made comments about his company's poor service on an Internet mailing list. Also named in it and in the suit that followed were the owner of the mailing list, the owners of several informational sites about the lawsuit, the owners of other forums where the lawsuit was discussed, the attorney for the defense, and several sites that merely ran banner ads promoting the defense fund set up for the lawsuit. Some defendents settled out of fear, and were forced to pay cash, transfer their personal domain names to Novak, or even run banner ads for Petswarehouse on their websites. Now, the attorney for the defense has announced that in round three of the lawsuit, Google has been sued, as well as several other sites that have carried news about the lawsuit, such as search engine Judge-For-Yourself.com and pet stores DoctorDog.com and FerretStore.com. Robert Novak is representing himself in this lawsuit, and thus it is effectively costing him nothing to persue this campaign of harassment. He's already gotten several thousand dollars from settlements and cost the defendents considerably more than that in legal fees. More details should be posted soon here, including court documents that tell why Google was added to the suit."

Comments

Mistake in comments (Pet vs. Pets Warehouse)

[vondo]

I was pretty confused reading the original comment.

The comments are about "Pet Warehouse", which is here while the link is for Pets Warehouse.

What happened, according to the Salon article, linked in the original /. article is that the "s" was left off.

More understandable since Pet Warehouse is a reputable outfit predating the dotcom boom. I've dealt with them lots of times.

obligatory http://www.petswarehousesucks.com/

[SirSlud]

here :)

Nice, but not to be confused with...

[mojotek]

Hopefully this won't have a negative affect on another online Pet store: Drs. Foster and Smith's Pet Warehouse. Their website being "www.petwarehouse.com" and this buffoon's being "www.petswarehouse.com".

In my experience, they are a very reliable source for all kinds of supplies, and it would be a shame for people to associate their site with this litigation crazy moron.

will he be suing the BBB next?

[night_flyer]

PetsWarehouse BBB Rating
The Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York, Inc. has provided an unsatisfactory rating, the Bureau's lowest, for PetsWarehouse. The BBB site states:

"This firm operates an affiliated business on the internet offering products through its Copaigue location. This firm has received 21 complaints in the last 36 months, of which 11 of those 21 complaints were filed in the last 12 months. Complaints to the Bureau have alleged: 1) nondelivery of ordered merchandise and 2) credit or billing problems. This firm has a pattern of not responding to complaints to its attention by the Bureau."

Re:Be careful what you say about Mr. Novak

[BrianH]

As much as I despise what Mr. Novak did with the whole fish complaint thing, a quick read of the ACTUAL LAWSUIT shows that this new suit has NOTHING to do with free speech or negative comments from unhappy customers. This is a completely new and UNRELATED lawsuit, that just happens to be from the same guy. Petswarehouse.Com is suing Google, and other search engines and petstores because they are using the Petswarehouse.com trademark to steal customers. Google is included in the suit because they are allowing paid placement customers (competing petstores) to use the PetsWarehouse.Com trademark as a keyword to display their ads. The competing petsores themselves are alleged to have put the petswarehouse.com trademark inside their meta-tags to attract customers. The suit also alleges that PetsWarehouse complained about the trademark infringement to Google, but that Google refused to abide by their own policy and remove the infringing material.

I hate to say it, but Mr. Novak may actually have a valid trademark suit here!