Monster Energy Drink Hires Trademark Bully To Go After Beverage Review Site

from the just-can't-get-enough dept

Just a couple weeks ago, we wrote about the ridiculous story of Monster Energy Drink trying to stop a small Vermont brewery from offering Vermonster beer, claiming trademark infringement. The whole thing seemed ridiculous, but now we have a clue as to what's going on. Against Monopoly alerts us to yet another, but even more questionable trademark complaint by Monster Energy Drink -- this time against a beverage review site. Writing a review of a product is not trademark infringement. However, the Against Monopoly writeup focused on the organization "representing" Monster Energy Drink and its parent company (Hansen's) -- and we immediately recognized the name from an earlier story. Continental Enterprises is a firm that gets big brands to give it the right to "represent" them in trademark issues -- and then goes hunting for anything that it can claim is trademark infringement, even if the use is clearly not infringing (such as a review site). According to reports, CE works (at least in part) on a commission basis -- where it gets a cut of whatever money it squeezes out of others. So it has little incentive to make sure the infringement is real. It just wants to get as much money as possible. I have no idea if the Vermonster dispute also involves Continental Enterprises, but going after a beverage review site is pretty ridiculous. This can't be doing good things for the Monster Energy Drink brand.

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Mark Helprin: All The Reviews Of My Book Sucked Because Publishers Assigned The People I Insult To Review It

from the interesting-theories dept

Mark Helprin, the well-known American author of many popular novels which are reasonably beloved, has painted himself into something of a corner, and now he seems to be lashing out at, well, everyone. You may recall that he wrote a silly, uninformed and downright ignorant op-ed piece calling for infinite copyright, a couple years ago. Of course, now he claims he wasn't calling for any such thing, but the original piece shows otherwise. He was so upset that tons of people showed up to prove him wrong, that he ended up writing an entire book on the subject. Yet, his real complaint in the book wasn't so much to push for infinite copyright (which, again, he insists everyone misread in his original column), but to smack around some silly commenters on blogs that made fun of him. He actually spends a lot of time dissecting anonymous comments right here on Techdirt in his book -- carefully selecting some of the more idiotic ones, while taking others completely out of context. He used that to support his thesis that those calling for weaker copyright laws were idiotic digital barbarians. Yet, of course, anyone could pick and choose some idiotic comments from copyright supporters and make the same silly argument.

Besides, there were many other problems with Helprin's book. It came across much worse than many of the commenters he attacked. It was filled with ad hominem attacks against these "digital barbarians" and repeatedly got basic facts wrong. Amusingly, considering he spends so much time mocking people for not understanding what he really was saying, the most incredible thing is that he does the exact same thing to almost everyone he criticizes. But, in the end, the biggest problem with Helprin's book was that it just wasn't very good. He gets so focused on his own use of language, that he fails to make a very strong point. And... nearly every single review of the book found exactly that.

But, Helprin is apparently not one to back down. Rather than respond to any of the complaints against his book -- including the massive factual errors -- Helprin has written up a 2,400 word screed slamming everyone for the poor reviews of his book. You see, it wasn't that the book was bad, but that, once again, no one actually understood what he was writing. And why? Well, according to Helprin, because every publisher assigned the book to the very "barbarians" he was trying to insult with the book. And, since we're all so clueless and inbred, of course we couldn't understand it:

Nearly every publication, left, right, and center, assigned the book, with digital in its title, to a resident digeratus, a member of the very tribe I provoke, and thus it was that I came to sell rosaries in Mecca.

Again, he fails to respond to a single point raised by any of the reviews. Instead, he just whines that people thought he was clueless, but he insists he's not. How could he be clueless? He quoted famous people!

It is why in making my argument I cite, and count as allies, Churchill, Thomas Hardy, Flannery O'Connor, Shakespeare, Yeats, Montaigne, and even Charles de Gaulle, among others.

But, the most ridiculous part of Helprin's whiny defense of how every single reviewer got his book wrong is his reference to one particular passage that many reviewers pointed to:

It would be one thing if such a revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels, but it doesn't. It produces mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom see daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world doesn't end; women who have lizard tattoos winding from the navel to the nape of the neck; beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch; and an entire race of females, now entering middle age, that speaks in North American chipmunk and seldom makes a statement without, like, a question mark at the end?

This bit of luddism provoked a bunch of responses, suggesting that Helprin was reaching the "get off my lawn, kids!" stage of life. However, the real problem wasn't just Helprin being an old fuddy-duddy, but the fact that he's flat out wrong. Mozart, Einstein and Raphael did what they did without copyright for the most part. Mozart's best works were actually highly derivative and he created his music at a time when copyright did not cover musical works. Raphael lived in a time before copyright. And Einstein's works had nothing to do with copyright at all.

Perhaps there's a simpler explanation for why no one liked your book, Mr. Helprin: it's just no damn good.

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Music Reviewer's Blog Suspended For Promoting Music

from the left-hand,-meet-right-hand... dept

It's really funny to watch the old record labels try to understand the whole music blogging culture. The folks in the promotions department send music bloggers mp3s and encourage them to post them, knowing that it'll get the musician attention. That's a good thing. But the folks on the legal side go the other way... often sending takedowns to the very same bloggers. Rafi Kam points us to a ridiculous situation involving Warner Music Group, who hired a firm called Gray Zone to help "deal with" unauthorized tracks being shared online. Apparently Gray Zone tracked down a song by Gucci Mane that was on well-known music reviewer Andrew Noz's website and sent an angry cease-and-desist to both Noz and his hosting company using all capital letters, including the phrase: "IMMEDIATELY REMOVE ALL LINKS, REFERENCES, DOWNLOADS, VIDEOS, STREAMING AUDIO, AND MP3 FILES ASSOCIATED WITH GUCCI MANE."

Noz didn't see the email, which his filter assumed as spam, but his hosting company did and suspended his entire site. Nice of them. When Noz contacted them, they told him that, based on the above sentence, he needed to go through his blog and remove every reference to Gucci Mane (after all, that's what letter said). Apparently, Noz had written about Gucci Mane quite a bit, so that was a lot of work. Of course, the letter is wrong. While there may be a copyright issue with downloads, it's difficult to see where there would be any copyright claim at all when it came to links, embedded videos (hosted elsewhere) or references. That's actually copyfraud by Gray Zone, on behalf of Warner Music Group, by claiming copyright on things that it does not have rights over.

Either way Noz scrambled and spent hours deleting everything on his site about this particular artist. After all of that, he spoke with a VP at Gray Zone who said that Gray Zone and Warner were really only demanding that he take down a single track. But, of course, that's not what the takedown notice said. Noz points his anger at Warner Music, asking why folks from Warner Music email him tracks all the time... but then get his entire site taken down for those very same songs? This isn't just the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it's the right hand shaking someone's hand, and the left hand smacking that guy in the face for shaking the right hand. And people wonder why the big labels are so hated?

I actually spoke with both Warner Music Group and Noz to try to find out more about this. Noz says that he's not sure if the one particular song was actually sent by someone from WMG, but that he gets hundreds of songs a week, many of which come from WMG, and he helps promote many of those tracks, so he finds it pretty ridiculous that rather than just contact him and politely ask him to take down the song, they had his entire site taken down. WMG noted that it, as a corporate entity, wasn't directly involved with this, but that it was handled by a subsidiary, Asylum Records. Asylum then sent over a statement:

Apparently, unauthorized copies of the unfinished and unreleased track "I Got All Of That" by Gucci Mane have been stolen and sent out to certain websites by parties unknown to us. In cooperation with the artist and his manager, we instructed our third-party vendor to notify websites to take down the unauthorized track from their sites immediately. We appreciate the cooperation of sites that recognize that this unfinished song does not represent the artist's complete vision and may have been obtained illegally.

Of course, that doesn't really address the issue. The complaint from Gray Zone didn't just target that one song, but all content related to this artist, and because of that, it forced the guy's blog offline -- all the while he's receiving plenty of songs directly from the record label. You can understand where there might be some confusion there. At the very least, someone should have just contacted the guy directly with a friendly request, rather than sending the immediate ALL CAPITALS cease-and-desist threat.

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Movie Screening Phone Bans Reach Ridiculous Levels

from the oh-come-on... dept

For years, we've found it absolutely ridiculous that the movie studios have required that anyone attending early preview screenings remove and deposit their mobile phones in some (often unguarded) box. The entire policy has never made much sense. First of all, a mobile phone is unlikely to have a decent enough camera or enough memory to actually video tape a movie. Second... who cares? This is all part of studios stupidly overreacting to the idea that their movies might leak online before the official release date. Yet, as we've seen there's almost no evidence to support the idea that the availability of the movie online has any negative impact on box office proceeds. So, for the uncomprehendingly small chance that someone at a screening is able to record the movie with his or her phone and get it online, and that version of the film somehow destroys box office proceeds... Hollywood has decided it makes sense to treat everyone (including movie critics) who attend preview screenings as if they're criminals.

It's even being taken to more ridiculous levels now. Valleywag points out that Time Warner entertainment critic was stopped from watching a Warner Bros. (yes, owned by Time Warner...) screening, because he refused to give up his iPhone. Yes, the same iPhone that does not have a video recording function. Perhaps they were afraid he'd be playing games through the screening? Or maybe Twittering away a live commentary?

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Author Offers Free Copy Of His Book To Anyone Who Writes An Amazon Review

from the free-books dept

It's pretty common for book publishers to send out free copies of their books to book reviewers and publications. It's part of the publicity effort that any new book tends to go through. However, in this day and age, pretty much everyone is a book reviewer thanks to blogs or Amazon... and one author is responding accordingly. ChurchHatesTucker alerts us to the news that author Charlie Finlay is offering a free copy of his book to anyone who promises to review it on Amazon. Basically, he knows that the best way to build buzz around the book is to actually get people to read it, and giving away the book to people who will provide that buzz is probably a cost effective way to get some attention. Now, some might question whether the reviewers will be "fair" because they received the book for free -- but that's true of most professional book reviewers already.

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Atari Apparently Learns Nothing From EA's Bad Experience With DRM

from the head-in-the-sand dept

Last September, (despite warnings to avoid overly cumbersome DRM), EA discovered just what sort of backlash annoying DRM could have when thousands of reviewers on Amazon slammed the game Spore for its overly limiting DRM from Securom. EA eventually backed down (somewhat), and on newer games seems a lot more sensitive to community concerns about DRM (though, many would argue not sensitive enough). Apparently, some of EA's competitors, however, haven't been paying much attention. Reader Tyler Hipwell sends in the news that Atari recently released the game Chronicles of Riddick with similarly awful DRM (requires online activation, limited to three total activations) and a ton of negative reviews are flowing to the Amazon listing. Either Atari didn't pay attention to EA's experience with Spore... or it somehow thought that the same thing wouldn't happen to its game as well. Neither one of those options says anything good about Atari.

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What Would Yelp Be Without The Negativity? Recommendations Instead Of Reviews

from the nothing-nice-to-say dept

SF Weekly's 4,333 word exposition about Yelp delves into many of the recent foibles of the not-yet-profitable community site. Since its inception in 2004, Yelp has played a key part in imbuing every-day consumers with the powers of professional critics. Now, with consumer reviews posted and shared online, instead of disappearing into the black hole of the customer feedback box, businesses shudder with fear at the potential of a bad review on Yelp. Sure, any business that regularly provides bad service would eventually succumb to the collective ire of community displeasure, but anecdotally, Yelp seems to amplify this effect. Although consumer reviews have been around for ages on sites like Amazon and CNET, Yelp's focus on local businesses expose a vulnerability not really seen in, say, the consumer electronics or book industry. An evening's dining choice is relatively fickle compared to a decision to buy a plasma tv, and one can see how that decision could be easily derailed by one strategically placed negative review. That said, as consumers become more savvy to sites like Yelp, their tolerance for a bad review or two should hopefully build. Or, as seen in the recent case of a San Francisco pizzera, businesses could learn to embrace their bad reviews.

Here's a thought. Whenever I visit a new city, I ask my friends for their recommendations, not reviews, of restaurants in the area. While it might be amusing to hear them rant about how awful such-and-such place was, ranting really does little good when trying to pick a place to eat out of the vast array of options that a typical city has to offer. Instead, maybe it's time for Yelp to put on the rose-colored glasses and offer an alternative view of the world: one where only recommendations exist. This is the approach taken by eats.it, a restaurant recommendation site that currently only serves San Diego. With no bad reviews to complain about, the complaint that a merchant doesn't get enough recommendations sounds much more like sour grapes. Furthermore, advertising on a page that features only recommendations of their establishment is a much more palatable proposition. Is the consumer less served by this rosy-eyed view of the world? Perhaps, but it would not be hard to see which establishments received less recommendations than others. Maybe mothers everywhere knew the answer all along when they advised: "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all."

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SF Pizzeria Puts 1-Star Yelp Reviews On Its T-Shirts

from the never-met-a-pizza-i-didn't-love dept

With all of the recent news about merchants up in arms over negative online reviews, a San Francisco pizzeria has decided to take a brilliant approach to the (albeit few) negative Yelp reviews about their restaurant. In a sort of "take back the night" approach, Delfina Pizza has adorned its staff with t-shirts that bear the text of their 1-star reviews. With sayings like "The pizza was soooo greasy. I am assuming this was in part due to the pig fat," Delfina boldly acknowledges that it understands everyone is a critic, and that it is not afraid of a bad review or two. Gone are the Ratatouille days where restaurants live or die by one star of some food critic's review; instead, perhaps restaurateurs will learn that reviews are a starting point for holding meaningful conversations with their customers. Of course, in this particular case, the strategy may backfire -- already one Yelp reviewer has submitted a 1-star review asking "am i good enough for a t-shirt now?"

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Doctor's Orders: Don't Review Me Online

from the stifling dept

The local review site Yelp has been under fire lately from some businesses that aren't happy with reviews people have written about them, or how they're displayed on the site. Not that this is anything new: people have sued the site for defamation before, while others have tried to game the system to make their businesses look more popular. But now, some doctors are trying to get patients to sign waivers saying they won't post comments about their doctors online (via Information Week). A company has set up a service that provides doctors with the waivers, then monitors review sites for comments about them. If they find a comment on one of the subscribing doctors, they attempt to use the waivers to get the sites to remove it. Of course, most of the comments are anonymous, so it's not clear exactly how they link a particular comment to a particular patient who's signed a waiver, and at least one site has refused to comply.

The founder of the service says the only thing that should matter to patients are a doctor's medical skills -- but that hardly seems true. Certainly they play a large role in determining a patient's happiness with their care, but there's the oft-referred-to "bedside manner" that also plays key part. Consumers have the right to as much information about their medical caregivers as they need to feel comfortable, but it can often be difficult to ascertain. That seems to play into doctors' hands, so it's hard to see these attempts to gag patients as little more than a further attempt to stifle anything that challenges the status quo in the world of medicine.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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If You're Thinking Of Paying People To Talk Nice About Your Company Online, It Probably Won't End Well

from the ethics? dept

A company called Cash4Gold, which pays people for unwanted gold items, gained some notoriety this week on the back of its Super Bowl ad, which featured Ed McMahon with a golden toilet and MC Hammer with a gold medallion of himself wearing a gold medallion. But it's also getting some more press online after somebody doing online "marketing" for it apparently emailed a guy that had written an unflattering story about the company and offered to pay him to take it down or rewrite it (via Boing Boing). The search results for the company feature some pretty unfavorable stories about it, but evidently instead of cleaning up its act, Cash4Gold would rather just splash out some Cash4Silence. This comes a few weeks after a Belkin employee got busted trying to pay people to write positive reviews about its products on Amazon. It's hardly surprising that companies do this sort of thing, but the potential downside of getting caught (not to mention the ethical concerns) should give them pause.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Negative Review On Yelp Leads To Defamation Lawsuit

from the this-again? dept

There have been plenty of stories about companies suing people for posting negative reviews about their business practices, and it still seems like a really dumb thing to do -- as in the end all it does is call a lot more attention to the negative review. That's what appears to be happening with a lawsuit over a negative review of a chiropractor on Yelp. The review claimed that the chiropractor was using questionable business and billing practices. The chiropractor threatened the reviewer -- and even though the review was deleted, sued the guy for defamation. Of course, now the details of the supposed unethical billing practices (involved trying to bill insurance companies significantly more, and when that didn't work coming back to the guy and asking him to pay up instead) are getting a lot more attention.

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Reminder: It's Still Not Illegal For Someone To Criticize You

from the but-it-won't-stop-the-lawsuits dept

We've written about similar stories plenty of times in the past, but Adam writes in to let us know about a new article highlighting companies who sue those who leave negative reviews of their business online. The businesses complain that the negative reviews can have a serious impact on business -- which no one doubts. But, assuming that the review is truthful or just an opinion, there's really not much that can be done about it. Most companies would be better served responding to the criticism, rather than busting out the lawyers. Even if they feel the criticism is unjustified, it makes more sense to address the points, rather than pulling out the blunt threat of a lawsuit.

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Amazon Caught Deleting Negative EA DRM-Related Reviews... Again

from the uh-oh dept

You probably remember the uproar that surrounded the release of Spore, where plenty of people were pissed off at EA's decision to use draconian DRM and made their feelings known via thousands of 1-star reviews on Amazon.com. At one point, all of those reviews disappeared from the site, leading some to accuse Amazon of censoring the reviews. Amazon quickly said that it was a glitch and the reviews came back.

However, it appears that "glitch" has come back -- and once again it's for thousands of DRM complaints on an EA game. EA released Crysis Warhead with the same awful SecuROM DRM, and the reviews made that clear. But, just as with Spore, the Crysis Warhead reviews magically disappeared. Amazon is once again claiming that it was a glitch, just like last time. As the article notes, there is one possibility, which is that Amazon has an automated system that tries to flag spam reviews, and the actions of the DRM complainers triggers that mechanism. That would make some amount of sense, though Amazon shouldn't keep calling it a glitch if that's the case.

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Did Amazon Delete Spore Reviews? [Updated]

from the they're-all-gone dept

Want to know how not to respond to criticism? By deleting it. Yet, it appears that's what Amazon has done. Earlier this week we wrote about the controversy of EA's decision to put cumbersome DRM on the highly anticipated video game, Spore. The response was that thousands of people started posting one star reviews of Spore, noting the problems with the DRM. Things then got worse when people realized that EA had misled customers about the fact that they could only have one user account on Spore.

Now, a bunch of people have noticed that Amazon appears to have deleted all of the reviews on the Spore page. This is only going to end badly. When you try to shut down a large group of people who feel wronged, you're not just whacking the bees' nest with a stick, you're setting it on fire with a flame thrower. The folks who were complaining are only going to complain louder, and louder. Remember what happened when Digg tried to takedown the AACS crack? Whoever was responsible for removing the comments -- whether it was Amazon or EA -- they may find that the reaction to trying to shut down the angry mob is only going to make folks that much angrier, and alert that many more people to the problems they have with EA's use of DRM.

Update: It appears that some, or potentially all, of the reviews are now back on the site, and Amazon is claiming that it was a "glitch" that they disappeared. Some people claim that their own reviews are not back yet, though, so the whole situation is a bit fluid. Either way, if it really was a glitch, it was a pretty bad time and place for such a glitch to occur.

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EA Ignored The Warnings; Now Getting Slammed For Spore's DRM

from the they-were-warned dept

Back in May, we wrote about an uproar in the gamer community over EA's decision to include some incredibly cumbersome DRM on some new games, including the highly anticipated Spore. That story got a ton of comments and plenty of other sites also wrote about it as well, leading EA to back down just a little bit, and promise to use slightly less draconian DRM. Either way, EA should have been well aware of how the community feels about DRM on games like Spore.

Apparently, the folks there didn't pay enough attention.

A bunch of readers have been sending in the news that Spore is getting slammed in reviews on its Amazon review page, as well over a thousand reviewers have all given the product one star, while trashing EA for the use of the DRM. Yet another lesson in what happens when your customers warn you ahead of time that they don't want you to cripple the products they buy from you -- and you fail to listen.

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Yelp Angers Its Merchants By Deleting Their User Accounts

from the yelp-me-rhonda dept

Review site Yelp caused quite a ruckus this week when they deleted a bunch of user accounts that they deemed to be gaming the system. Many of the users whose accounts were deleted were business owners -- Yelp accused them of trading positive reviews with other business owners, quid pro quo. Yelp has had a tumultuous relationship with its merchants in the past because of negative reviews from Yelpers; some merchants had even tried to ban Yelpers from even visiting their establishments. This tension is unfortunate, since Yelp makes its money from selling these very merchants their services. That said, hopefully Yelp has not overlooked the larger problem that still exists on their site: an overwhelming number of reviews per establishment without any good tools for filtering or determining trust. Furthermore, Yelp has become quite a target for "Foodies," who complain that the reviews from users are pedestrian and inconsistent; Eater has an entire column devoted to the "shortcomings and nuances of the Yelp empire." Despite all of the negative attention that Yelp has been getting, the most important factor is whether or not it continues to grow as a useful resource for users. Yelp just recently surpassed Citysearch in number of users in March of this year, so perhaps they are on the right path.

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Atari Sues Websites Over Pre-Release Reviews Of Games

from the what's-illegal-here? dept

Slashdot points us to the news that Atari has started suing various websites that posted reviews of new games prior to the release date of the games. The reviews are negative, but the real problem, according to Atari, is that there was a press embargo on reviewing the games, and if someone has a copy of the game prior to the embargo and hasn't agreed to the embargo, then it's clear that they pirated the game. At least one site has explained that it purchased the game legally from a retail source who mistakenly sold the game before the release date -- which would suggest the problem is with the retailer, not the reviewer. No matter what, the whole thing seems ridiculous. Suing those who review your games (even if the reviews are not good or if the reviews come out early) is a sure way to make sure many sites refuse to review anything you do again.

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Metallica Says It's Sorry About Review Takedowns; Blames Management

from the always-management's-fault dept

Mathew Ingram alerts us to the news that the band Metallica has responded on its own website to the controversy over representatives from the band demanding reviews of the band's latest album get taken offline. The band's response is basically to blame its management company:

We were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites. Our response was "WHY?!!! Why take down mostly positive reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched about the next record. . . that makes no sense to us!" So after a few rounds of managerial ear spank and sentencing everyone at Q Prime to 20 push-ups each, we figured why not take matters into our own hands and just post the links here on our site.

And, with that, they linked to the reviews. While plausible, the whole thing sounds sketchy at this point. It seems like a weak cop-out to say "oh, it was our managers' fault" when the band has had so much controversy concerning how it has interacted with the internet community. Besides, even this response rings hollow. The band only seemed concerned that the management team took down "mostly positive reviews," not the fact that it took down reviews. It's nice that they have now linked to the reviews, but the fact that this happened in the first place still seems like a problem.

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Metallica Still Doesn't Get It: Forces Early Reviews Of Latest Album Offline

from the have-they-ever-used-the-internet? dept

While Metallica has been trying to appear more internet friendly these days, it sounds like the band still has a lot to learn. Representatives of the band invited a bunch of music journalists and bloggers to a "listening party" last week to hear tracks off its upcoming album. Attendees weren't asked to sign any kind of embargo or non-disclosure form. So, as you might expect, some of them went home and wrote up quick reviews based on what they heard. And that was the point at which Metallica representatives went around demanding that these early reviewers take down the reviews, claiming that the songs they heard were an early mix of the album, rather than the final cut. If that's the case, then they shouldn't have played it for journalists -- or they should have at least required a non-disclosure agreement. To go around forcing journalists to remove their reviews of music played for them by a Metallica representative is simply ridiculous. Not only that, but it wasn't even as if the reviews were bad. Last time we wrote about Metallica, we noted that the band was still suffering from the hit its reputation took in 2000 when it sued Napster and various colleges. Pulling stunts like this only makes sure that its reputation will continue to slide.

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Infomercial Companies Never Learn: Another One Suing Site For Negative Reviews

from the or-you-could-just-improve-your-product dept

Greg Beck, from Public Citizen, has written us in the past a few times about bogus trademark lawsuits being brought against online review sites, such as InfomercialScams.com. Back in May there was a case where a company advertising its wares via infomercials sued the site for trademark infringement. Clearly, it was not the trademark use that was the problem (especially since it's difficult to see how that's trademark infringement). It was merely a way to try to get negative reviews (written by third party users of the site) taken offline. A similar case came up this fall when the infamous Video Professor sued 100 anonymous critics on the site, demanding that the owner of InfomercialScams.com turn over their IP addresses.

Beck is now back alerting us to the fact that the Video Professor has withdrawn his subpoena for info from the site, but is still forging ahead with the lawsuit (and is seeking the identity of a user on Wikipedia). However, he also notes that yet another company that advertises via infomercials is now suing InfomercialScams, claiming trademark infringement. Once again, this is clearly not trademark infringement, but an attempt by the company to bully an independent site into taking negative reviews offline. Just imagine if any of these companies put half as much effort into improving their products and services instead of calling the lawyers whenever anyone has anything critical to say about these firms.

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