Slashdot Mirror
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."
If not, maybe next week they will be
Nothing is more idiotic than a legal system that allows one person to abridge the security and personal freedom of another, but exercising their own right to continually sue or press frivolous charges against individuals/organizations that cross their path.
We NEED a law to deal with idiotic lawsuits. That is to say, one that carries penalties for those use lawsuits as a continual source of revenue. I think I read earlier that there are some laws regarding individuals that are sue happy, why not make it federal (and get the Canadian government to apply one as well, although Canada seems less lawsuit-crazy than the US).
Lawyers: Who do you want to sue today? - phorm
Let's hope that no spammers pick up on his email address or mailing details:
Honestly though, how can a piece of sh*t like this guy keep taking up court time with these suits? Espscially with news sites that are merely reporting the proceedings of cases? It's ridiculous - I'm sure the RIAA are already sending him job application forms so he help them in their quest to crack down on freedom and the causes of freedom!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
In the same vein, I'm tempted to do something like this...
Dear PetsWarehouseSupplier Inc.:
Hello. I would like to tell you that one of your dealers, namely PetsWarehouse.com, is costing you business.
Mr. Novak, the proprieter of said business, is in my humble opinion more about litigation against paying customers than about providing a proper venue for distributing your fine products to the public. Customers who complained publicly to others when they received poor customer service from his web based business, are being sued for $15,000,000.
Unfortunately for you, your product is prominetely displayed on the homepage of PetsWarehouse.com. As such, I conclude that you are sympathetic to Mr. Novaks lawsuits, which in my opinion are frivilous and only intended to stifle free speech and the exchange of opinions. I refuse to support any business which holds this view, so I will, in the future, refrain from purchasing any product from you, your subsidiaries or any other company affiliated with your products.
Thank you for your time,
Signed
A Former Potential Customer.
About the same as you suggest, just approaching the problem from the other end.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
ding! give that user a banana!
Long Island Business News reports:
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
Pardon me for replying to you, but I want this to be near the top, where everyone, especially ROBERT NOVAK, head meatball in charge.
Want to really make him hurt? Just point out that his store really is horrible. Service? Sucks. Price? Sucks! There are much better stores that have better stock, lower prices, and excellent customer service. Two such examples are:
That Pet Place
Drs. Foster & Smith
(Note: I am not affiliated in ANY way with either of those stores mentioned. They had nothing to do with being written here. I put them here. They're not the droids you're looking for. I AM. All of the above is my very own personal opinion, and I stand by it.)
So come get me, big boy! Sue my frigging ass off for enjoying my first ammendment rights. I even live in New York. And I'm bored. It costs me just as much nothing to be sued by you as it does for you to sue me. Let's just frigging GO. =)
Which troops would he rally? Do you think that a platoon of geeks bearing down on Novak's mansion would change things?
No, but a quarter million geeks pounding away at his website address every 12 hours (when the story gets inadvertantly re-posted) can keep his bandwidth maxed out without letting any "customers" through.
Plus, slashdot viewers are not what most people would consider "shy" in the online world, so if given a rousing "Sons of Scotland" speech from Mr. Taco, it's probable that you'd soon have millions of messageboard posts and emails to friends and quick-n-dirty websites thrown up on stupid/clever pun-ful domain names. We could bleed Novak dry just on the cost of all the paper he'd need to file suit against all these individuals, and their hosting companies, and the search engines who list them, and the PC manufacturers who sold them the computers they commited the 'harassment' from, and their lawyers, and ... their pets, for not frequenting his establishment...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
That's rather unfair, as Robert Novak is neither a lawyer or a reasonable sample of the society at large.
Quoting from this Long Island Business News article:
If all the info on the net is true (virtually all is posted by defendants), we can only hope the defendants ask the court to fine him, or some of them file an anti-slapp suit against him.
But that won't happen without donations to the defense fund, or someone with deep pockets and an interest in free speech on the internet (google??) gets involved and makes an example of Robert Novak.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I wonder if there really are bots crawling here. Only one way to find out:
slashbottest@quickp.ath.cx
-no broken link
Is it really "winning", when Google removes all links to your web site?
I guess you could always live with print advertising... that really works well on the Internet, doesn't it?
Clue: URLs in a print advertisements aren't "clickable"...
-- Terry
Main news/defense fund, full dockets
.net and .org versions of this domain, by the way)
Other defense fund page
Defense Fund merchandise
Discussion forum for the lawsuit
PetsWarehouseSucks.com (Novak bought up the
Aquatic Plants digest
Google search with many relevant results
Rec.Aquaria.Freshwater.Plants
Between all those pages, you should be able to find plenty of links to archives of the messages in question, full court documents, links to news coverage of the story, etc. etc. etc. If you have any interest in aquatic plants or planted aquariums, check the link to the Aquatic Plants mailing list, where all this began. You'll find all the original posts, plus some early discussion of the lawsuit. Also, you can find plenty of stuff in the archive of rec.aquaria.freshwater.plants, including the rantings and ravings of Mr. Novak himself, as well as posts from a few people who support him and happen to have EXACTLY the same spelling and grammer that he does...
There's all kinds of fun things to discover about this case. For example, the NY Better Business Bureau gave PetsWarehouse its worst possible rating for its business practices. Mr. Novak claims that the BBB is *actually* talking about the retail store, not the website, and as a result, he's threatened to actually SUE the Better Business Bureau.
Mr. Novak is on very shaky legal ground. He's been reprimanded by judges (since he's filed three seperate lawsuits and several ammendments, there are a lot of judges involved) for not having a clue what he's doing. He told a magazine that he considers suing people to be "his hobby", and a profitable one, because he lives right down the street from the courthouse and most people can't afford to travel to his venue to fight the lawsuits. When Slashdot first covered the lawsuit in April, someone posted a comment sayign that they new Mr. Novak, and he told the poster that he has a lawyer in the family who gives him advice on filing baseless lawsuits for extra income.
Also, one of Mr. Novak's big claims in this lawsuit is "trademark infringement" (since we ALL know that saying "I don't like XYZ" is a violation of XYZ's trademark, right??), however, there's some question of whether he owns the trademark at all. He used Pets Warehouse as a "common law" trademark (IANAL, but I think that means he never actually filed the trademark, he just started using it and that entitles him to some legal protection), however, when he filed bankruptcy in the 90's, he didn't list any intellectual property that he wanted to keep on his bankruptcy application, thus it's entirely likely that he lost any trademark he might have had on the name during the bankruptcy.
He also refuses to actually serve papers against any of the defendents who live in California, because California has a strong SLAPP law that would bite him in the ass he if tried to actually bring any California residents into the lawsuit.
I'm not the only one who thinks all this is very, very crazy.