Public Citizen Sues Dozier Over Failure To Serve Ronald J. Riley

Legal Issues

from the this-just-gets-better-and-better dept

We’ve written a couple times about lawyer John Dozier’s highly questionable case against Ronald J. Riley. As I’ve pointed out, even though I disagree with Riley on almost everything, and find that he regularly insults me and my family, Dozier’s lawsuit seems highly suspect. Most of the “lawsuit” is just a personal attack on Riley. And while it’s slightly ironic to see an attack on him that’s so similar to the attacks Riley does on others, it’s difficult to see what that has to do with the actual lawsuit, which simply accuses Riley of violating Dozier’s trademarks by hosting some websites that make fun of Dozier (in an over-the-top manner). Dozier seems to be accusing Riley of trademark infringement because he did some search engine optimization (SEO) tricks to drive his own, anti-Dozier sites, up in Google. But SEO isn’t illegal. Nor are most of the things Dozier mentions Riley has done in the lawsuit.

In fact, others have pointed out that Dozier seems to be using the lawsuit not as an actual lawsuit but as a way to defame Riley without recourse. That would explain why Dozier has been promoting the lawsuit everywhere, highlighting all of the negative statements about Riley, while failing to respond to everyone pointing out that the actual lawsuit is focused on trademark issues and seems baseless. The entire focus of the lawsuit seems to be to trash Riley over many things that have nothing to do with the questionable trademark claim. To add more fuel to the fire, it now appears that while Dozier is promoting the attack on Riley everywhere… he’s failed to actual serve Riley.

Paul Alan Levy from the group Public Citizen finds this highly distasteful and abusive, to the point that Public Citizen has now filed suit against Dozier for his tactics in this case, telling us:

Although we certainly understand why Ronald Riley arouses some pretty strong feelings around the community, we see no basis for Dozier’s trademark claims. It is particularly interesting that Dozier filed a lawsuit, and has extensively publicized the lawsuit, and has used it as the basis for takedown letters to Riley’s ISP’s, but he has never served the lawsuit on Riley. It is as if he wants there to be a lawsuit out there but does not want to get it decided. So, we have filed suit on Riley’s behalf against Dozier, asking for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement.

Filed Under: john dozier, lawsuits, public citizen, ronald j. riley, trademark