Happy family

Find a legal form in minutes

Browse US Legal Forms’ largest database of 85k state and industry-specific legal forms.

Jones Day’s Strange War on Links

I came across a disturbing internet/law story on Slate. Definitely a big issue for online reporting.

Jones Day is an international law firm (2,300+ lawyers). BlockShopper is a real estate news website.

According to the Slate story, Jones Day sued BlockShopper for trademark infringement when BlockShopper reported that two Jones Day lawyers had purchased certain real estate. The heart of Jones Day’s complaint was that Blockshopper had formatted the lawyers’ names with hyperlinks to the lawyers’ bios on the Jones Day website — a type of formatting you see everywhere online (I’m using it in the three hyperlinks above).  

Trademark infringement is when you use someone’s trademark (or something confusingly similar) to sell your own products. Jones Day argued that using the lawyers’ hyperlinked names would make people think Jones Day was associated with BlockShopper. How and why, I am at a loss to explain. Per Slate:

The idea that readers of a real estate news site would somehow be confused by links to Jones Day, on the other hand, shouldn’t have passed the straight-face test. One legal blogger proposed that the attorneys who brought the suit take ethics classes. Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen described the lawsuit as a “new entry in the contest for ‘grossest abuse of trademark law to suppress speech the plaintiff doesn’t like.’ ” The digital rights groups Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Citizen Media Law Project, and Public Knowledge tried to file a friend-of-the-court brief asking for the case to be dismissed.

Blockshopper fought the law firm for a while — wracking up “six figures” (!!!) in legal bills — but settled after a federal judge denied Blockshopper’s motion for summary judgment. The settlement is even more crazy than the lawsuit. Get this:

[T]he real estate site said it agreed to change how it links to Jones Day. BlockShopper will no longer use the names of Jones Days attorneys as anchor text. Instead, it will use the full and cumbersome URL. In other words, Timpone said, instead of posting “Tiedt is an associate,” the site will write “Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate.” (The agreement also calls on BlockShopper to say that the lawyer in question is employed at Jones Day and that more information about the attorney is on the firm’s Web site.)

Talk about form over function! It changes nothing. Nothing! But it means the law firm controls how BlockShopper writes about it. What if lots of major companies dictated to news organizations the details of how hyperlinks must be formatted, with no consistent standard? It would be extremely burdensome trying to write a story while keeping all the requirements straight. I don’t think this type of restriction has a chance in court, and it’s too bad the case didn’t go all the way to a verdict. I’ll be interested to see if this sort of thing comes up again any time soon.

B