[The http://www.shopsatwillowbend.com/ site in question is now password-protected. The official mall site appears to be http://www.shopwillowbend.com/ As always, I invite Taubman (the mall owner, copied above) to reply. --Declan]
--- Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 18:18:01 -0500 From: "Paul Levy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Another internet free speech case I am writing to call your attention to a brief that Public Citizen just filed as a friend of the court in a case, now pending in federal court in Detroit. The case involves Henry Mishkoff, a resident of Dallas, Texas, who created a web site describing a shopping mall called "Shops at Willow Bend" that had opened near his home in the Dallas suburb of Plano. He named his web site, naturally enough, shopsatwillowbend.com. His site was in operation for two years when suddenly the mall's developer, the Taubman Company, sent him a demand letter asking him to take down the site and hand over the domain name. Mishkoff expressed a willingness to discuss this, but when they kept threatening to sue him, and then actually did sue him, he was so disgusted that he registered more domain names, such as taubman.com and shopsatwillowbendsucks.com. Taubman deliberately sued him in Michigan, presumably in order to make it hard for Mishkoff to defend himself, even though the law is pretty clear that they have to go to Texas to file this case (unfortunately, being pro se, it did not occur to Mishkoff to move to dismiss on this ground until recently, after he got legal advice from me). Taubman got a preliminary injunction against the original site, and now it is asking the court to shut down the "sucks" site which recounts, in a fashion both folksy and humorous at times, Mishkoff's travails as a pro se defendant in the legal system at the hands of an attack dog trademark firm. The web site is good reading in that sense We have just filed a brief as a friend of the court urging the judge both that the First Amendment protects Mishkoff's right to use Taubman's names to identify the subject of his criticism, and that any event Mishkoff's sucks site does not violate the trademark laws in any respect. We have also agreed to represent Mishkoff in his appeal from the preliminary injunction. This issue of the use of trademarks as part of the domain names for critical web sites has come up in a number of other case, and Public Citizen has represented several operators of "criticism" sites, many of which are featured on our web site at http://www.citizen.org/litigation/briefs/IntFreeSpch/index.cfm The brief is posted on our web site at http://www.citizen.org/litigation/briefs/IntFreeSpch/articles.cfm?ID=6448. Paul Alan Levy Public Citizen Litigation Group 1600 - 20th Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20009 (202) 588-1000 http://www.citizen.org/litigation/litigation.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
