Wrong hair color ruined her social life

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Stratford, Connecticut woman against the cosmetics firm L’Oreal, saying she hadn’t proven her contention that the company had put dark brown dye in a box labeled as blonde. “I can never go back to my natural blonde hair,” complained Charlotte Feeney, who said that she ended up going on medications for depression as well as wearing hats. “I feel fake about that. Also blondes do get more attention than brunettes, of course, emotionally, I miss that.” (Daniel Tepfer, “Woman sues over wrong hair color”, Connecticut Post, Oct. 7)(via ABA Journal).

Update: “McDermott, Client Sanctioned $4.3 Million”

“McDermott, Will & Emery and client Medtronic Inc. must pay $4.3 million in attorney fees as punishment for alleged ‘abuse of advocacy’ in a patent case, a Colorado federal judge ordered Tuesday.” As we noted in our coverage back in February, the judge found at that time that the McDermott lawyers “artfully avoided the limitations of the patent claims and created an illusion of infringement. They did so with full awareness that their case was without merit.” (Zusha Elinson, The Recorder, Oct. 2; WSJ law blog, Oct. 2).

Microblog 2008-10-07

  • All politics aside, Soros’s views on boom-bust cycles deserve attention [Naked Capitalism] #
  • Sebastian Mallaby on misplacing blame for crisis [Washington Post; but see] #
  • Warren Buffett on subject of Fannie-Freddie oversight [MargRev] # Others (h/t @srcleere) say regulators did warn of Fannie/Freddie, but Congress protected them #
  • Back from NYC meetup with Kevin O’Keefe and Matt Homann, learned huge amount from them about using Twitter #
  • Nocera: Waxman hearing was point-scoring political theater [NY Times] #
  • Hank Greenberg on AIG collapse [NY Times DealBook] #

Claim: link on our name pointing elsewhere infringes trademark

Attorney John Dozier has already made a couple of memorable appearances in this space, first when he asserted in a cease and desist letter that it would violate copyright law for his target to post the text of that cease and desist letter in part or in full on the web, and shortly thereafter when one of the clients of his Dozier Internet Law firm, an outfit known as Inventor-Net, purported to “strictly prohibit any links and or other unauthorized references to our web site without our permission”; Dozier’s own site had a user agreement which purported to ban linking to the site, using the firm’s name “in any manner” without permission, or even looking at the site’s source code.

Now the Virginia-based attorney is attracting attention with a new legal battle against Ronald J. Riley, a Michigan inventor and patent-law activist who has harshly criticized Dozier (and many others) in online posts and comments. Among other tactics, Riley has set up “sucks” websites that vilify Dozier and his law firm and turn up in search results on Dozier’s name. Dozier’s lawsuit against Riley invokes not defamation law, as might have been expected, but trademark law, and its most curious provision is #25, which complains that it is a trademark violation for Riley’s site to base a hyperlink on the phrase “Dozier Internet Law” and have it lead to Riley’s own attacks on the Dozier firm rather than to the Dozier firm’s site. Of course it’s long been common in online commentary to link on someone’s name and have the link point somewhere scathingly critical of them (e.g., “Erin Brockovich“). Dozier claims, perhaps implausibly, that potential clients will suffer confusion between Riley’s services and his own.

Paul Alan Levy at Public Citizen’s Consumer Law & Policy Blog writes (Oct. 2):

Although Dozier filed his lawsuit, he does not seem to have served it on Riley. Instead, he has used the making of a claim for trademark infringement to warn the hosts of Riley’s web site that if they do not take the web site down they risk a further display of Dozier’s wrath, directed at them. See here, here, and here. And his invocation of trademark law was very crafty, because although the Communications Decency Act immunizes ISP’s from liability for most claims based on the content of web sites that they host, that immunity does not extend to trademark claims.

Public Citizen has now sued for a declaratory judgment that Riley is not liable to Dozier on trademark grounds. The conflict has even aroused sympathy for Riley on TechDirt, among whose editors he had been anything but popular before.

U.K.: Tories vow to roll back police workplace-safety rules

Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said if the Conservatives return to power they will amend the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974, sections of which have applied to police work since 1997. The much-criticized results have included refusals to allow police officers to venture into potentially dangerous crime scenes and rescue situations. The party also pledges to curtail a trend toward the filing of official charges against citizens who intervene in efforts to stop crimes. (James Kirkup, “Tory conference: Dominic Grieve promises to scrap police health and safety laws”, Telegraph, Sept. 30). See also Jun. 30, 2003 (police not warned that climbing on roofs was dangerous).

Cuomo suit: minority listeners undercounted in radio ratings

The office of New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo “said it planned to file a lawsuit this week against Arbitron, the company that compiles the data, because of concerns that minority listeners were not being adequately represented. … Recruiting and retaining enough respondents from these demographic groups [blacks and Hispanics] has proved difficult for Arbitron, leading some stations that cater to urban and ethnic audiences to claim that they are not being sufficiently counted.” (Brian Stelter, “Cuomo to Sue Radio Ratings Company, Claiming Minorities Are Underrepresented”, New York Times, Oct. 7).