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 acky
lawsuits are the counter point to tort reform, which is covered in this article.
While tort reform is mostly an issue pushed by big business and their
governmental wing (the Republican Party), wacky lawsuits are filed all the time,
and the vast majority are thrown out of court before they proceed an inch.
A few make it farther, but since a case has to be handled properly, convince a
judge of its merits, and then win over an impartial jury, there are plenty of
checks and balances to keep this sort of thing from swamping our legal system.
At least in theory.
The
cases mentioned on this page are ones that got into the news and amused me
enough to comment on, regardless of their merits or validity. More
recent additions are added on top of this page, with multiple stories about the
same lawsuit grouped together.
The Mike Rowe Soft.com
Lawsuit
January
19, 2004
Ridiculous story of the big
corporate legal weasel type. Some kid in Vancouver named Mike Rowe is doing part
time website design, and has a business and website using his name, and a bit of
a clever play on words. Yes, it's MikeRoweSoft.com.
Microsoft got word of this somehow, and as you might expect, their reaction was
a typical corporate attack, demanding that he give up the rights to the domain
name. He asked for compensation, rightly pointing out that he has a
business using that name and after all, it's his name, and a damn catchy one at
that. MS offered him $10, the price he paid for register it, and when he
said that wasn't enough to gut his fledgling business, they went into full
out legal attack mode.
It took a while for Microsoft
to come after Mike Rowe Soft, but on Nov. 19, Rowe got an e-mail from law firm
Smart & Biggar, claiming he was infringing copyright and demanding that he
transfer his domain name to Microsoft.
He replied asking for some
financial assistance for losing the name and site. He told the lawyers how
much work he put into the business and said the domain name was worth at least
$10,000.
This week, a fat package of
correspondence was couriered to Rowe's home, which claimed that all along his
intention was to extract "a large cash settlement."
Customers of Microsoft could
also be confused by the mikerowsoft Web page, the letter said.
Now I have no sympathy for
cyber squatters who buy microsoft.com or other typo domains (For instance: both
www.dialboii.net and www.diaboii.net were formerly porn sites redirects.) and
try to leech traffic and act like a nuisance, but this is different.
There's no way on earth anyone is going to type in mikerowesoft by accident, or
confuse his site with microsoft.com, or think he's in any way affiliated with
the megacorp, and he's not doing anything to try and create confusion. It's just
pointless harassment of the little guy, by a huge company with infinite money to
burn on nuisance mails and lawyers.
If you look on the
kid's site, he's got several updates about the issue, which mostly serve to
illustrate how much better he is at website design than writing, but his side of
the story is an interesting read as well.
January 14, I received a
package from the lawyers' office FedEx Priority Overnight. Inside I found a
book over an inch thick with a 25 page letter explaining to me that I had all
along had the intention to sell my domain name to Microsoft for a large cash
settlement. This is not the case, I never thought my name would cause
Microsoft to take this course of action against me. I just thought it was a
good name for my small part-time business.
How much do you suppose it cost
MS to pay the lawyers who researched this, prepared the legal documents, printed
it all out, and mailed it off to the kid? Quite a bit more than he'd have
taken to just give them the domain name in the first place, I'd reckon. Plus if
they'd never come after him, no more than about 50 people in Vancouver would
have ever heard of his website or the domain name anyway. Now it's become
a big news story and everyone on earth with an axe to grind towards M$ is
jumping on the issue, and it just makes them look stupid, while dealing them
counterproductive publicity. If I were someone in charge of things at MS,
I'd be chewing someone's ass off over handling this one so poorly.
Not that MS has ever shown any
hesitation to act horribly and become PR pariahs in the past...
Update
on that Canadian kid with the MikeRowesoft.com website.
Teenager Mike Rowe's Web site
www.mikerowesoft.com was taken off the Internet Monday, but not because of
legal action by Microsoft Corp. Too many people were trying to look at his Web
site, similar-sounding to the technology giant's own domain name. The Langford
high school student and part-time Web designer had to take it down because he
could not pay for the extra bandwidth to keep his site open to all the
traffic.
The busy news Web site
CNN.com featured his David-and-Goliath story on its home page Monday. Rowe
said a quarter of a million people tried to look at his site in 12 hours.
Microsoft engaged Smart &
Biggar, which bills itself as Canada's largest law firm specializing in
copyright and intellectual property, to chase Rowe. He got an e-mail in
November asking him to stop using the domain name mikerowesoft.com. and last
week came a 25-page letter with a fat package of supporting materials
threatening legal action. The letter said customers of Microsoft could be
confused by his Web domain name and claimed that Rowe's intention all along
was to extract "a large cash settlement."
Microsoft softened its hard
line after the deluge of publicity since Rowe's plight became public.
"We do take our
trademark seriously but maybe in this case a little too seriously," said
Jim Desler, of Microsoft's corporate communications department at head office
in Redmond, Wash.
Desler said the company
recognizes the spirit in which the young entrepreneur had registered the
domain name and was reconsidering its earlier legal moves. The corporation
wanted to resolve the matter soon, he said, and is willing to "circle
back" on the issue.
"It's an issue that
we're engaging in good faith in terms of trying to resolve amicably,"
said Desler, although he would not offer details.
February
2, 2004
I hadn't heard any more news
about that MikeRoweSoft.com site or issue lately, so I looked it up and was
somewhat shocked by what I found. First of all, he's reached
an agreement with MS and is giving up the domain name. Nothing amazing
there.
Microsoft will pay for Rowe's
expenses, the cost of switching over to a new site, provide training for
certification on Microsoft's products, a subscription to Microsoft's developer
program Web site, and an Xbox video game console with games, as well as an
invitation to bring his parents along for a visit to Microsoft's Redmond,
Washington, headquarters for an annual technology fair.
What is amazing is
his auction. He's ebaying the inch-thick legal document that Microsoft
sent him with their C&D letter, the bidding began at $500, there have been
185 bids, and the current top offer, with four days to go is... $205,100.00.
And that's serious, as far as I know.
Amazing what a little world
wide publicity will do for you, eh?
September
12, 2003
This
one will make you laugh, if you don't find it too ridiculous to even laugh
at.
An Egyptian lawyer said
Wednesday he was planning to sue the world's Jews for "plundering"
gold during the Exodus from Pharaonic Egypt thousands of years ago, based on
information in the Bible. Nabil Hilmi, dean of the law faculty at Egypt's al-Zaqaziq
University, said the legal basis for the case was under study by a group of
lawyers in Egypt and Europe.
The relevant passage from the
Bible, Exodus 12 verses 35 to 36 reads: "The Israelites had done as Moses
told them; they had asked the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and gold, and
for clothing. ... And so they plundered the Egyptians." This translation
is in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
He said the argument that
Jews could sue Egypt for enslaving them was also being studied by experts.
Hilmi gave no details of
which court he planned to file the case in or whether he thought such a case
would be exempt from the sort of statute of limitations that in many countries
rules out legal cases after a certain period of time.
He also declined to put a
value on the goods "plundered."
What about the absurdity of
filing lawsuits based on 2000 year old accounts of folk myths and legends?
*cough*
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