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A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

abovethelaw.com

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Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#31

Post by lucisferre »

johnminton wrote: post #23
digitalsushi wrote: post #12

I remember back when I was 16, I did a web page about my home town, claremont nh. I did this site: http://digitalsushi.com/midashi/claremont/ I was working for an ISP in town, and someone with the town called up the ISP to ask whom owned the site. Since I worked there, I was simply transferred the phone call. You can imagine how contextually confusing that would be, to be handed a call that technically had nothing to…

"ask who owned" not "ask whom owned". "whom" isn't just a word to put in to sound educated - it's used only when the "who" is an object. Here it is not.

Perhaps they asked "to whom the site belonged?".

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#32

Post by michaelhoffman »

hawkharris wrote: post #15

It's true that most cease-and-desist letters contain awful legalese, but here's a great example of a well-written, classy one: https://brokenpianoforpresident.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/...

What's nice about that one is it appears to fulfill their obligation to show that they are policing unauthorized uses of their trademark without causing any real harm to anyone else.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#33

Post by dangrossman »

anoncow wrote: post #13
cperciva wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my videos only contain my voice, which I'm pretty sure is not copyrighted Your voice isn't copyrighted, but you might infringe if you were singing a copyrighted song.

>you might infringe if you were singing a copyrighted song Or if your video happens to be one of those which youtube partners don't like. Youtube, apparently, has a deal independent of the DMCA, which allows big media compan(ies) to ban any video on youtube. There was a discussion earlier today on HN, in which I said I still trust Google. This is one incidence where Google could have tried to follow its motto of "Do…

You could argue that this is the only arrangement in which YouTube can exist; is having the site with overzealous copyright enforcement worse than having no site at all?

Google may prevail in court if sued for the millions of instances of infringement it hosts, but it'd still have to become the largest US employer of lawyers to handle and fund the dozens of major lawsuits it'd face every year. Is it profitable enough to do that? Does Google want to dedicate so much of its resources to court battles instead of its core competencies? Even with the DMCA, they still get sued.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#34

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #17

Can I play? http://web.archive.org/web/20080402062531/http://pturing.fir... http://web.archive.org/web/20080402062531/http://pturing.fir...

The source of the above lawyer letter was headsurfer.net a site poking fun at Robert Marsh, thin-skinned Houston internet magnate who often referred to himself as "teh HeadSurfer" and employer of last resort for many college students at U of H http://web.archive.org/web/20040103044611/http://www.headsur...

More details: http://web.archive.org/web/20031017004205/http://www.headsur...

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#36

Post by axb »

austenallred wrote: post #14
digitalsushi wrote: post #12

I remember back when I was 16, I did a web page about my home town, claremont nh. I did this site: http://digitalsushi.com/midashi/claremont/ I was working for an ISP in town, and someone with the town called up the ISP to ask whom owned the site. Since I worked there, I was simply transferred the phone call. You can imagine how contextually confusing that would be, to be handed a call that technically had nothing to…

For back in the day that's actually a fairly well-designed site.

And a great favicon to boot.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#39

Post by meepmorp »

digitalsushi wrote: post #26
johnminton wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ask who owned" not "ask whom owned". "whom" isn't just a word to put in to sound educated - it's used only when the "who" is an object. Here it is not.

You don't have to be a dick about it. I thought 'whom' was right because the subject of the sentence was 'someone'.

Next time, just say that the object case on the pronoun was licensed by an elided preposition. Continuing to call out the dickish behavior of the other poster works, too.

Re: A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter

#40

Post by larrys »

Don't agree with the humor and tact of this letter even though "it worked".

"Shmucking" someone can backfire in many cases and cause a bigger problem.

To be spiteful (I mean do we really know the mental state of the attorney writing the c and d?) maybe he would decide pro bono to file some action even knowing it might fail, on his own time, to defend his honor. Which this attorney would then have to defend pro bono.

The other thing with regard to the listed domains is as they always say "don't ask a question you don't know the answer to". They probably don't know whether the others have been approached or not. And it doesn't matter at this stage anyway. So what. Maybe he was the first one.

Lastly Kaplitt isn't known for expertise in either domain names or IP. If he was he would know that very often people with bogus claims are able to wrestle domains from people for bogus reasons.

Oh one last thing. In his letter he states that "ICANN rulings have held that..." (or something like that). ICANN doesn't issue "rulings" like that for this (.com). He is almost certainly referring to the UDRP cases not ICANN.

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