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Domain-Name Protest Is Protected Speech
Lunartik links to this Detroit Free Press report, writing "The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled Friday that Michelle Grosse did not violate the law when she used the name of Lucas Nursery and Landscaping Inc. for a Web site she created to complain about the Canton, MI nursery. 'This is a very important case,' said Paul Levy, staff attorney with the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. 'This is a mainstream circuit court that said using the Internet and the name of the company to criticize a company is perfectly legitimate.'"
How is this not legitimate???
I thought usuing the name of a company to criticize said company was perfectly legal
...or am I supposed to refer to Micro$oft as something else?
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Too bad it wasn't in time for these guys
It seems to me that there are more than enough exceptions to free speech already. Glad to see this allowed, let's go a little farther.
including the right to spell speech in any way you want: speach spich, Spewoch...etc
by selling the domain name back to the Nursery, or another Lucas Nursery, for that matter. :/
hopefully, they'd give her a little more for the domain considering the hassle it has been for her to go up against the company and the legal system.
No, because then you would be acting in bad faith, which the quote you selected specifically says she was not. Troll harder next time.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
What photo should I put up?
A link courtesy of the archive.org.
Although she owns the site name until 2005, Grosse said she is done. "I am so broke right now defending myself. . . . I defended freedom of speech but I don't want to open that can of worms again."
Sadly, it costs a lot of money to exercise free speech in America
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Ok, So the the federal courts have ruled in favor of these people, this is a Good Thing[TM] IMHO...However, who's to say they can't try to then persue this through ICANN which has its own rather nutty Domain Dispute Policy which has done things like uphold a claim by Molson (beer) to own canadian.biz (which was later overturned in canadian courts...) Who exactly has the ultimate jurisdiction here?
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
A summary of that decision is here. The basics of the case are that the defendant used the company name in conjunction with the term "sucks" and Bally sued because the site could "confuse" consumers. Of course, Bally thankfully lost.
Today, there are several sites that warn about Bally Total Fitness' fraudulent and misrepresentative activities.
According to archive.org, 7/20/2001, the page read as below. Seems like a very straightforward and factual complaint, unlike many of the xxxxsucks.com domains I see now. My Lucas Landscaping Experience I hired Lucas in Canton, MI to landscape my new home last year. I was very displeased with the results. Here is my story. Lucas didn't use slag sand for the base of any retaining walls. The results you can see above -- sinking walls. After less than a month and lots of rain, the walls sank in three places. Brick circles built around two identical trees between the sidewalk and curb were made two different sizes. Lucas refused to repair them. The ground was not prepped before sod was laid. Unfiltered topsoil and sod were laid on top of existing weeds. The grade in the backyard was altered to prevent proper drainage. Inspectors from Canton Township confirmed this. Most of the sod was laid hastily during a rain storm which resulted in numerous holes throughout the lawn. Sprinkler heads were covered up by sod -- (they did fix that the next day). Lucas does NOT warranty sod so they refused to repair the holes. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that Lucas would not take credit cards or a personal check, they wanted cash or money orders only. This provided me with no way to hold back payment until my concerns were addressed. I've learned a very expensive lesson about fine print in contracts. I wish I'd gotten those verbal promises in writing. The Better Business Bureau was usless. Lucas never once came out to look at the finished product. Instead they replied to the BBB with an absurd letter. Apparently that is all they need to do to stay in good standing. I paid $5400 to a second contractor to remove all of the sod and retaining walls, regrade, rebuild walls and lay all new sod. My landscaping is now beautiful! Many, many more photos are available if you are interested. Feel free to e-mail me today.
If you read the article, you'll see that she didn't register something like lucasnurserysucks.com, but lucasnursery.com. I'm suprised that it wasn't decided that she was using their name to trick potential customers into going to her site, since many people assume companyname.com will work. It'd be similar to someone registering slashdot.com (if it wasn't already registered) to make an anti-Slashdot site.
I think it would have been acceptable if she had something like http://www.lucasnurserysucks.com but she didn't have the right to take the domain name that was the name of the company. Where are they supposed to have their website then? Not everyone necessarily agrees that Lucas Nursery and Landscaping Inc. sucks.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
For those interested to learn more about Public Citizen, here is their website.
It concerns me that this even got this far ... are we going to be validated for everything we say or write - sound's Orwellian.
Dear Mr. Coward:
I represent the owners of the estate of Eric Blair, better known by his nom de plume, "George Orwell".
You may remember Mr. Blair for such tropes as "a boot heel stamping a human face-forever", "the Two-minute Hate", "newspeak", "Animal Farm" and of course, "Big Brother".
What know may not know, but I am now for the record informing you, is that Mr. Blair's Intellectual Property in these and other phrases, including the adjective "Orwellian" itself, has been acquired by The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corporatism Turns Individuals into ConsumerSheep, Ltd., a division of All Your Base Are Belong To A Few Rich Men and Their Lobbyists, LLC.
As representative of the afore-mentioned corporation, I am writing you to demand that you cease and desist from using the word "Orwellian", or any other Intellectual Property belonging to ny client, except with express written permission.
Should you wish to arrange a limited license to use the word Orwellian -- either on a per use basis, or for a set period --, please contact my office immediately for a rate sheet.
Thank you,
A. Lackey
Law Offices of
Plutocrat, Prevaricator and Politico,
Attorneys at Law
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Ah. So if I claim I got bad service from someone, and then produce some form of evidence to back it up (hello, Photoshop? Pictures of XY's company rep doing something awful, please), then I can set up a domain name and squat legally.
Well, if your claim is false, you can be easily sued for libel.
You see, there are existing remedies to protect against what you propose without resort to the "novel" -- read unprecedented and dangerous -- limitations on free speech that the plaintiff in this case, and too many corporations in general, advocate.
But like most attempted usurpers of freedom, they spread FUD first, claiming that unless freedom is throttled, all sorts of bad things will happen -- and so Draconian new laws and new legal interpretations are needed.
Much like what you're doing in your post -- or, may I be so bold, like the RIAA and its call for judge-less subpoenas, or advocates of the "War on Drugs" and the resulting erosion of 4th amendment rights, or the fear-mongering that brought about the so-called "Patriot Act".
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The full text of the opinion here if you're interested.
"The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program." - Niven
Isn't it always the case though, crap companies have to do a lot to 'protect' their image, they shove out so much crap and then when someone takes the time and effort to stand up and tell other people about it, they use their ill gotten gains to attempt to shut said person down. What they don't seem to understand is that the publicity this causes through media attention then lets everyone know just how crap that company really is.
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Got any ideas for content? If so, email them to the domain owner.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Money, when isn't it about money.
This case, however, goes one further. It doesn't require that "sucks" or any other negative word be part of the domain name of a complaining site. If Bally.com was unregistered, then somebody who wants to complain about them can grab that domain name first and use it for a complaint site about Bally... they can order that site down, and the offical site of the company would just have to pick another domain name.
That's a blow to those who think trademarks trump the I-registered-it-first system of domains. It's not typosquatting if you post a site that's on-topic to the name, even if it's a negative site.
That the govment was the proxy of the corporations... ;-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I wish this ruling had been around about five years ago, when I was fighting with American Express.
They stuck me with $12K of bogus balance transfers on a brand new "Blue" card, and refused to believe they weren't mine despite my attempts to rectify the situation over a period of almost a year.
They were amazingly quick to sic the lawyers on me, though, when bought amexblew.com and created a site detailing their indifference to my problem.
It's about time some company got smacked down for trying to silence an online critic with a legitimate beef.
~Philly
'This is a mainstream circuit court that said using the Internet and the name of the company to criticize a company is perfectly legitimate.'
Notice that Levy felt obliged to point out that this ruling came from a mainstream circuit court, rather than from one of the fringe circuit courts whose opinions regularly get trashed by courts further up the food chain. It is a sad statement about the legal system in the US that the opinions comming from some courts are so wrong, so often, that their rulings don't count until they are confirmed by a higher court.
Instead of working it out with the woman as in:
Lucas: We'll fix yard, you give us domain
Disgruntled Customer: OK.
They spent all that lawyer money to sue the woman. And all over a job they'd done allegedly done poorly. So now they still haven't made the woman happy, AND the entire world knows about it AND they don't have their domain.
Talk about complete lack of common sense.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It's interesting that you mentioned PETA, which was involved in one of the earlier domain name disputes. peta.org once pointed to a site which linked to webpages pages dealing with animal products and hunting, under the banner People Eating Tasty Animals. Sadly, the lobbists managed to take control of the domain.
You can still find a copy of the page at http://mtd.com/tasty/ Since it is so old, most of the links are broken. However, the hate mail section is still up.
I hired a contracting firm to level my house. They screwed it all up and cracked the slab. This was a well-known national company. They said it wasn't their fault and they weren't going to pay to fix it. I had pictures before and after and gave them 48 hours to agree to help fix the situation. They blew me off.
So I acquired the domain (companyname)sucks.com and put up a before-and-after set of pictures along with my side of the story.
24 hours later, they agreed to settle with me. I paid them $6000 for their work. They gave me over $14,000 as part of the settlement and maintained the guarantee on their work.
I know these days people think that "nobody cares" and for the most part, I agree. But part of this has to do with many companies who have factored customer laziness and unwillingness to protest into their business model. I refuse to let crappy contractors or other businesses get the better of me, and if more people did this, these companies wouldn't get away with the stuff they do.
So if someone screws you over, give them every chance to fix the situation. If they still don't, feel free to tell everyone that you think they suck. Which reminds me, I got screwed over by this company in Arkansas: Big Impressions - and I will never do business with them again. And until they resolve my situation, I'll make it public I think they're sleazebags until the end of time.
hahaha, "We're not those 9th circuit wackos!"
What's sad is the fact that the media's reporting of legal issues is so shoddy and rife with partisanship that people seem to think some circuits are overturned more often than others, when this is not the case.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?