Academic

Jones Day and Blockshopper.com: Trademarks or Privacy Rights?

By Jacqueline Lipton

I don't know how many people have followed the settlement in the case involving Jones Day and blockshopper.com - the case in which Jones Day sued for trademark infringement over blockshopper's reference to Jones Day associates and their property purchases.  There is a good discussion of the settlement agreement in slate.com.

I always thought that the the trademark infringement claims seemed somewhat specious.  I also find the settlement peculiar.  Under its terms, blockshopper is required to display links to Jones Day associates in a particular format, with the Jones Day URL for the appropriate associate in parentheses after the reference.  Thus, as Wendy Davis reports in Slate, instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site may write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate."  I suppose it's arguable that, assuming there actually was any consumer confusion, this might dispel that confusion.

However, when I first heard about the case, I had thought the concern was more about the privacy of the associates - in that they didn't want details of their real estate purchases displayed all over the Internet.  (I noted this in an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer last year. ) Notwithstanding that the material is part of the public record, it was protected by "practical obscurity" prior to the advent of services like blockshopper.com so was at least in some degree "private" or less then fully public.  Even if the settlement protects Jones Day's trademark, it  does nothing for the associates' privacy. 

It also opens the door to a variety of different companies making diverse requests to online services to display information about them in a certain way, thus increasing the costs of doing business online, if your business model involves reference to the activities of other businesses or their employees.  As Wendy Davis notes:  "Consider what it would mean for Web publishers if lots of other companies decided to demand a say over how other sites linked to them. Jones Day wants URLs used as anchor text, but it's not hard to imagine that another company would want something else?a name or a description, for instance. Web sites could then be forced to use different linking protocols for every company they write about. Not only would they lose control over stylistic decisions, but accommodating a variety of individual requests could prove clunky and labor intensive, which also means expensive." (Slate.com, Feb 12, 2009).

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on February 17, 2009 (boomark / email).