Free for a Fee

This interests me because I am a lawyer. It is the story of a legal battle between BlockShopper, a real estate news site that regularly links to law firms and clients, and Jones Day, one such law firm, which protested when links to bios of its lawyers were put up on BlockShopper’s website. This information was of course public, so theoretically it is liable to be up for public scrutiny at any time, but Jones Day objected that being public was, somehow, different from being accessible. So they sued BlockShopper for creating in customers an impression that “Jones Day was affiliated to the real estate site”. The judge who heard this case did not share my view (’wtf’) and seemed to agree with Jones Day; BlockShopper, faced with enormous litigation costs, decided to compromise.

more

The content in this post was found at http://aranichakrabarty.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/a-case-that-could-change-the-way-you-link-forever/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.