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Startup Threatened Into Settling Over Hyperlinking
An anonymous reader writes "A tiny startup that was threatened by a massive law firm over nothing more than a humble hyperlink has been forced to settle and change its linking policies, handing Goliath the win in this gratuitous trademark case. Under the agreement, real estate startup BlockShopper can no longer include hyperlinks anywhere on its website to Jones Day, a massive Chicago law firm, except explicitly on URL text. Essentially, jonesday.com is okay, but not blah blah blah." I wonder if the owners of jonesdaysucks.com feel the same way.
...and not one memo to a tech guy for a technological solution? I mean, if you don't like a site deep-linking into your own, isn't it a trivial one-line change to the server setup to block referrers?
This whole blah blah blah linking scandal is just so blah blah blah stupid. Heck maybe we can cue a blah blah blah Googlebomb to demonstrate just how bad Jonesday is with the handling of this blah blah blah issue.
BTW: Jonesday, if you're thinking of suing me don't bother, I've got no money and know plenty of lawyers who will work for me anyways. It's not so much blood from a stone as it's blood from a raging inferno.
...in bed
According to this blog and many other sources, the lawyers in question were Dan Malone and Jacob Tiedt, who do indeed work at Jones Day according to their own web site. It's not clear to me what, exactly the issue is there. The names involved in sales of a property are ordinarily recorded as public information (unless it's done through an agent or something). The information about these gentlemen's employment is right on their employer's web site. Is Jones Day claiming that putting this information together is illegal?
The blog cites another article in a law journal about supposed concerns about privacy. Fair enough. But if that's the case then these guys have probably gone out of their way to keep all personal information private.
Wait, what's this? Jacob Tiedt is a pretty distinctive name. There can't be too many of those in Chicago. And, wow, that's strange. Why the heck does the guy's name appear all over the place in a Google search that simply uses "Jacob Tiedt" and "Chicago"? Heck, one of the web pages registers his political donations which ALSO indicates that his employer/occupation is "Jones Day/Attorney" and gives his ZIP code. Lexis Nexis gives all sorts of details too, and (gasp) links directly to the jonesday.com web site. Horrors. And, strange, apparently he doesn't have an unlisted number, because his name is easy to find in the various on-line white pages. It's almost as if he hasn't made the slightest effort to remain incognito.
It looks like Jones Day is going to spend a lot of time in litigation if they want to expunge the web of any links to Jones Day and these guy's personal information, and half of the web pages are as a result of their initial attempts with Blockshopper. Hello? Streisand effect?
The apparent remedy in the settlement was to prohibit links like this: Daniel P. Malone Jr., while links like this: www.jonesday.com/dpmalone are acceptable. Huh? I don't get it.
What a farce.
We are actually going about this the wrong way. See, if you do a search for "Jones Day", the law firm still comes up first. What we need is something like Jones Day Jones Day Jones Day! (Don't click on the links, trust me!!!) Or some other equally despicable site. Maybe we can get Jones Day the company off the front page of google (maybe not, but I can dream)!
Qxe4