Puck’s Blog

Every morning I open up my “Blogs” group (Maxthon has tabbed browsing and you can create a “group” of sites that gets opened all at the same time each in its own tab) and read the online blogs that I’m interested in.

One of these is Neil Gaiman’s Journal.  I saw today that he’d been served notice by a bunch of lawyers who represent Four Square Productions, the company that owns Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

So he did something that’s on legally shaky grounds, right?  Wrong.  Not just wrong, but wrong-squared.  I can unequivocally say that the Lawyers at Branfman & Associates not only have the wrong guy, but are also dead wrong in both the legal aspects of the alleged infringment, and also they’re stupidly trying to attack someone giving their client free marketing, and more importantly, a higher Google PageRank.

What are they accusing Neil of doing?  He’s guilty of the incredible crime of linking to the Official Killer Tomatoes web site via a site called Tomatoes Are Evil.  Unfortunately, Neil doesn’t have anything to do with that site, but let’s ignore that slip-up except to point out that it’s so retardedly easy to find out who owns a domain that I can totally understand why Neil thought this might be a joke at first.

Oh, by the way, did you see what I did there?  I also linked to the Official Killer Tomatoes web site.  Oh no, I did it again!  Obviously I’m breaking some kind of law!  Obvious only to stupid lawyers who don’t understand the Internet at all, and also don’t understand what “infringing” means.

In the letter they sent to Neil, they claim he (though actually they meant http://www.tomatoesareevil.com/ which has nothing to do with Neil except that it has a picture of him with a devil-horned tomato) violates the Lanham Act, though they don’t mention which specific section that “linking to the official web site of their client” violates (here’s a hint as to why: because linking doesn’t violate that act!) and also the Copyright Act.  Again, there’s no mention of which specific section they’re violating.

So, in essence, they’re telling him to stop linking to their client’s site.  The link from Tomatoes Are Evil’s Links Page doesn’t “deep link” into the Official Killer Tomatoes web site, it links directly to their front “splash page”.  It doesn’t attack or denegrate them at all, nor does it claim ownership of the trademark.  The link is present along with other external links.  In short, they’re doing nothing but helping promote Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and doing nothing wrong.  They even have a links to purchase Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (and the rest) from Amazon on their “shop” page!  THEY ARE SELLING THE PRODUCT LEGALLY.

And also, as mentioned earlier, they got the wrong guy.

Stupid!  For all your copyright enforcement needs, be sure to bypass Branfman & Associates!

Update!  I have a solution!  Obviously Four Square doesn’t want people linking to their site.  Well, they can easily make it so nobody can visit their site by using referral banning!  Here’s the code to add to their .htaccess file in their web server’s root directory:

RewriteEngine on
#Options +FollowSymlinks

# ban all referers except main host

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^(http://www.killertomatoes.com/*)(0,1)$
RewriteRule \.(html)$ notice.html [L]

This will forward anyone following a link from a site other than http://www.killertomatoes.com/ (oh no I did it again — somebody stop me!) to the notice.html file where you can warn them that they’re in big big trouble if they don’t remove their traffic-encouraging link.   (thanks to Ryan Anderson for helping me fix up the code above!)