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Pro Bono Lawyer Fights C&D With Humor
Zordak writes "When Jake Freivald received a questionable Cease and Desist letter from a big-firm attorney, demanding that he immediately relinquish rights to his website http://westorage.info, his pro-bono lawyer decided to treat the letter like the joke that it was. In a three-page missive, the lawyer points out the legal, constitutional, and ethical problems with the letter that led him to conclude that the letter was a joke. He concludes, in a postscript, with an unsubstantiated demand for $28,000 in overpaid property taxes, and offers to lease the city the domain name 'westorange.gov' in exchange."
It's westorange.info, not westorage.info. The editing is ridiculous.
Why bother the appropriate response is:
------------
Re: Cease and Desist Order
No.
Regards
xxxx
Doesn't exactly inspire confidence if his underlings can't even spell check.
It's not a typo. It's written by a lawyer. You're not supposed to be able to read it and understand it.
Why bother the appropriate response is:
No.
I would have used two words, but, hey, that's just me.
No sig today...
"No, sir."?
I would have used
"I refer you to the reply in arkell vs. pressdram"
I don't think it's a typo - I *think* it's saying "Trenk has recently completed bid litigation over $100 million" (i.e. he's taken it to trial, to conclusion)
All told it's a vile (and very legal) sentence with no punctuation. The proof-reader in me can't find a way of writing it in a better way though (well, not without rewriting the entire sentence)
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca
Groucho Marx
Abstract: While preparing to film a movie entitled A Night in Casablanca, the Marx brothers received a letter from Warner Bros. threatening legal action if they did not change the film’s title. Warner Bros. deemed the film’s title too similar to their own Casablanca, released almost five years earlier in 1942, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. In response Groucho Marx dispatched the following letter to the studio’s legal department:
Dear Warner Brothers,
Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.
It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.
I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.
You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about “Warner Brothers”? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, and even before there had been other brothers—the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (This was originally “Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?” but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other one, and whittled it down to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”)
Now Jack, how about you? Do you maintain that yours is an original name? Well it’s not. It was used long before you were born. Offhand, I can think of two Jacks—Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and Jack the Ripper, who cut quite a figure in his day.
As for you, Harry, you probably sign your checks sure in the belief that you are the first Harry of all time and that all other Harrys are impostors. I can think of two Harrys that preceded you. There was Lighthouse Harry of Revolutionary fame and a Harry Appelbaum who lived on the corner of 93rd Street and Lexington Avenue. Unfortunately, Appelbaum wasn’t too well-known. The last I heard of him, he was selling neckties at Weber and Heilbroner.
Now about the Burbank studio. I believe this is what you brothers call your place. Old man Burbank is gone. Perhaps you remember him. He was a great man in a garden. His wife often said Luther had ten green thumbs. What a witty woman she must have been! Burbank was the wizard who crossed all those fruits and vegetables until he had the poor plants in such confused and jittery condition that they could never decide whether to enter the dining room on the meat platter or the dessert dish.
This is pure conjecture, of course, but who knows—perhaps Burbank’s survivors aren’t too happy with the fact that a plant that grinds out pictures on a quota settled in their town, appropriated Burbank’s name and uses it as a front for their films. It is even possible that the Burbank family is prouder of the potato produced by the old man than they are of the fact that your studio emerged “Casablanca” or even “Gold Diggers of 1931.
If it was any more petty, it would be a home owner's association.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I find it ironic curious visitors are doing what the West Orange County failed to do.
Doesn't exactly inspire confidence if his underlings can't even spell check.
Nowhere in that sentence does the word "check" or anything remotely similar in misspelled form appear.
How you can deduce from that his inability to misspell "check" is beyond me.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yup, found plenty of dirt here, no idea how true all this is but it seems to be some bad blood involved.
It does seem unusual that the town council is messing around with their own PR committee.
Plus, Freivald is/was pretty active politically so that might be where he ruffled some feathers.
Luckily, "tried" is the verb in that sentence. The "to conclusion" is an adjectival phrase.
A tip of the hat to Mr. Kapplitt responding to government overreach with a sense of humor. This is fine example of why lawyers work pro bono publico. I'd love to see this case go to trial so that future first amendment cases can cite Mr. Kaplitt's letter. Intel has a long history of using geographic names as project names because you can't copyright a geographic name. I worked on 'Year 2000 Compliance" at Intel. I thought I was working on Y2K compliance until the legal department sent out a notice that someone had asserted a copyright to Y2K. I once ran a BBS called "The Stack Exchange" which focused on HyperCard. I receive a nasty call from someone who wrote HyperCard applications for a company called the "The Stack Exchange." I changed the name of my BBS to avoid a legal hassle. If the caller hadn't been such an asshole I would have gone out of my way to explain the name change and to promote The Stack Exchange on my renamed BBS. The moral of the story is that it pays to ask nicely before sending out the cease and desist letter. Jack Daniel's took this approach when a book cover had the look of a Jack Daniel's label. Jack Daniel's even offered to cover the costs of designing a new cover for the book.
Adverbial, I believe, since it modifies "tried", not "bid litigation".
“I'm seated in the smallest room in the house. Your letter is before me. Soon it will be behind me.” — Voltaire
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Yes, that's exactly what it's saying.
The term "tried to conclusion" means that the matter was brought to trial, and the trial has completed, as opposed to being stalled in an endless cycle of motions and counter-motions, or settling out of court, or otherwise not finishing.
Considering that some lawsuits last several decades, simply saying that he brought a particular litigation to trial isn't really enough, because it's vague as to whether the trial is still ongoing. Similarly, ozbon's proposed alteration is vague, because it leaves open the question of how the litigation was completed. It could have been laughed out of court during pre-trial.
The language used was specific, concise, and complete. Since the majority of a lawyer's work involves reading and writing legal documents that must be specific, concise, and complete, this is a good thing. Your lack of understanding is due to your assumption regarding the definition of the word "tried". If that's a significant barrier to your understanding of his website, you should probably be looking for a dictionary, not a lawyer.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Left-to-the-imagination off?
That doesn't make much sense.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.