On September 21, 2007, DirectBuy, a company that apparently helps customers to buy furniture directly from manufacturers, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Leonard through its lawyers, Dozier Internet Law, P.C. The letter claims that Leonard and his users had defamed the company by referring to its direct-buy plan as a "scam" and a "nightmare." It threatens a lawsuit unless Leonard removes "all defamatory and disparaging statements" about DirectBuy from his websites and compensates the company for its attorneys fees and costs. Most interestingly, the letter ends with an assertion of copyright on behalf of the law firm:

Please be aware that this letter is copyrighted by our law firm, and you are not authorized to republish this is any manner. Use of this letter in a posting, in full or in part, will subject you to further legal causes of action.

Public Citizen Litigation Group got involved on behalf of Leonard. Lawyers for the group not only posted the Dozier firm's letter, but sent a powerful (yet cheeky) response entitled "How not to write a cease and desist letter -- an open letter in response to your September 21 threat." The response not only disputes DirectBuy's defamation claim and its expansive reading of the important recent CDA 230 case, Fair Housing Council v. Roommate.com, 489 F.3d 921 (9th Cir. 2007), but also takes the Dozier firm to task for its copyright warning, calling it "the worst thing about your letter". The Public Citizen lawyer continued:

Such a posting [of the letter] would be fair use. Moreover, inquiry by my colleague Greg Beck produced the interesting information that the copyright in the letter has not been registered. Sadly, according to what you told him, you have been successful in this intimidation because none of your cease and desist letters has ever been posted.

There is always a first time. We are posting the letter on the Public Citizen web site (the letter can be found at http://www.citizen.org/documents/directbuycd.pdf) so the public can assess our differences by comparing your contentions with our responses. By this letter, we are inviting you to test the validity of your theory that a writer of a cease and desist letter can avoid public scrutiny by threatening to file a copyright law suit if his letter is disclosed publicly on the Internet.

There appears to have been no developments after Public Citizen's response letter.

On September 18, 2006, Lou Cabron, a contributor to the webzine, "10 Zen Monkeys," wrote an article about Michael Crook, the operator of "craigslist-perverts.org," a website that publicized responses to fake personal advertisements posted on Craigslist. In the article, Cabron posted a still photographic image of Crook from a newscast on Fox News. Cabron's article, called "In the Company of Jerkoffs," was critical of Crook's controversial tactics.

The next day, Crook sent a DMCA take-down notice to the website's internet service provider (ISP), claiming that 10 Zen Monkey's use of the photographic image violated his copyright in it. In response to the notice, the ISP made 10 Zen Monkeys take down the image.

10 Zen Monkeys then changed its ISP and re-posted the image. Crook sent another take-down notification to the new ISP on September 22, 2006. On October 30, 2006, Jeff Diehl, the publisher of 10 Zen Monkeys, sent a counter-notification to the ISP pursuant to notice-and-takedown procedures found at 17 U.S.C. § 512(g),requesting that the image be re-posted. On November 15, 2006, the ISP re-posted the image because Crook had not filed a lawsuit "seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider’s system or network," as required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(2)(C).

Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Diehl then filed a lawsuit against Crook in federal court in California, claiming that Crook violated Section 512(f) of the DMCA, which imposes liability for making knowing, material misrepresentations in a DMCA takedown notice. Diehl argued that Crook knowingly misrepresented that he was the owner of the copyrighted image because the copyright clearly belonged to Fox News. Diehl also contended that Crook knowingly misrepresented that posting the image infringed his copyright because the posting of the image was a fair use. Diehl also claimed that Crook's actions constituted tortious interference with contract and unfair business practices under California law.

In March 2007, Diehl and Crook agreed to a settlement. As part of the settlement, Crook agreed to withdraw his DMCA notices, take a copyright law course, and record a video apology.

Eros, LLC has created adult entertainment products in the virtual world Second Life, which it sells to other Second Life users for Linden dollars, which can be converted into US dollars. Another Second Life user, with avatar name "Volkov Catteneo," allegedly copied Eros's products and sold them to other Second Life users without authorization. According to the TimesOnline, the products at issue are beds that allow users of Second Life to have virtual sex in them.

In July 2007, Eros began a John Doe lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement in federal court in Florida. Eros filed an ex parte motion seeking permission to issue subpoenas to discover information about the identity of the anonymous defendant from Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, and from PayPal, which was used to pay for Catteneo's account. The court granted the motion, and Eros obtained account information from each company.

However, Catteneo then gave an interview with Reuters, during which he claimed that he had provided both PayPal and Linden with false information. Eros then filed a motion for permission to issue subpoenas to AT&T and Charter Communications seeking subscriber information for certain IP addresses allegedly used by Catteneo. The court granted the motion in September 2007.

On October 24, 2007, Eros filed an amended complaint, naming Robert Leatherwood, a resident of Texas, and ten John Doe defendants. The amended complaint alleges that Leatherwood acted in concert with unknown parties to make and sell unauthorized copies of Eros's products.

On March 20, 2008, Eros filed an unopposed motion for entry of a judgment by consent against Leatherwood. The judge granted the motion, and the final order enjoined Leatherwood from further unauthorized copying of Eros's merchandise.

Mr. Watt altered a photograph of a billboard that he found on the website of "ex-gay" ministry, Exodus International, and posted it on his blog. The billboard originally read "Gay? Unhappy? www.exodus.to", and Watt altered it to read "Straight? Unhappy? www.gay.com".

Through counsel, Exodus sent Watt a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that his alteration and use of the billboard image infringed Exodus's trademark and copyright rights. The letter demanded that he immediately remove the image from his website.

Watt contacted the ACLU, which put him in touch with attorneys at Fenwick & West, who wrote a response to Exodus on Watt's behalf. Watt's response letter argued, with respect to the copyright claim, that his use of the photograph constituted fair use. With respect to the trademark claim, Watt's letter argued that he did not make a commercial use of Exodus's mark, and furthermore that there was no likelihood of confusion as to the source or sponsorship of the image posted on Watt's blog because his message was so fundamentally antithetical to Exodus's message.

Exodus's lawyers subsequently announced that they would not be suing Watt.

Two female Yale Law School students, captioned as Does I & II, sued Anthony Ciolli, the former chief education director of the popular law school admissions forum, AutoAdmit, and a host of pseudonymous users of the forum over vulgar, sexually explicit, and threatening comments posted about them on the forum. In addition to making numerous derogatory and sexually explicit statements about the two students, pseudonymous users of the site created another website, t14talent: The Most Appealing Women @ Top Law Schools (now defunct), and posted photographs of one of the students without her permission. (Although the complaint is not entirely clear on this point, the student claims copyright ownership in these photographs in addition to publicity rights, indicating that she may have been the creator of the photos and posted them online.)

According to the complaint, the two students complained about the forum postings to the AutoAdmit staff, but AutoAdmit did not remove the material. Ciolli disputes that he had any authority to remove the offensive postings.

In June 2007, the two students sued in federal court in Connecticut, asserting claims of defamation, copyright infringement, unauthorized appropriation of name and likeness, unreasonable publicity given to another's life, false light invasion of privacy, and other torts. Soon after filing, they moved to proceed anonymously, and the court granted that request.

In August 2007, the plaintiffs moved to modify the court's scheduling order in order to give them time to investigate the identity of the pseudonymous defendants and to amend their complaint. The court granted the initial request and two subsequent requests for thirty-day extensions, the last of which was requested on October 4. According to a tip posted on David Lat's Above the Law blog, it is unlikely that the court will grant a fourth extension, so an amended complaint may be forthcoming relatively soon.

Update:

11/8/07 - Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint dropping Ciolli from the lawsuit.

1/24/08 - Plaintiffs filed a motion for expedited discovery seeking to uncover the identities of the pseudonymous posters listed in the complaint.

1/29/08 - Court granted motion for expedited discovery.

2/22/08 - Pseudonymous defendant "AK47" moved to quash the subpoena directed at AT&T requesting information about his identity.

3/2/08 - Plaintiffs deposed former defendant Anthony Ciolli, at which Ciolli acknowledged that his AOL Instant Messenger username is "AnthonyCiolli."

3/4/08 - Former defendant Anthony Ciolli filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court against the plaintiffs, their lawyers, and other defendants for wrongful initiation of civil proceedings, abuse of process, libel, slander, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contract, and unauthorized use of name or likeness.

3/18/08 - Plaintiffs issued a subpoena to AOL seeking the names of "all persons who have registered or used" the username "AnthonyCiolli" and related information about the account, including "other user names and login IDs and/or Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses associated with the IM username 'AnthonyCiolli.'"

4/7/08 - Ciolli filed a motion to quash the AOL subpoena in federal district court in Virginia.

06/13/08 - The court denied AK47's motion to quash the subpoena seeking his identity from AT&T.

08/05/08 - Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint that names Mathew C. Ryan (previously known by username ":D") as a defendant. Legal Satyricon "can confirm with 100% certainty that the guy in the complaint is neither an attorney nor a law professor."

8/13/08 - Defendant "a horse walks into a bar", a.k.a Ryan Mariner filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that the plaintiff's have stated no cause of action against him and that they have failed to prosecute the action against him despite offers to accept service made through counsel. 

9/10/08 - Plaintiffs filed papers in opposition to Mariner's motion to dismiss.

9/19/08 - The United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia held that the plaintiffs' subpoena to AOL seeking the names of "all persons who have registered or used" the username "AnthonyCiolli" was facially invalid because it was issued from the wrong court.  The court determined that it should have issued from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Because the court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction, it did not reach the merits of Anthony Ciolli's motion to quash. 

10/26/08 - Plaintiffs filed a notice of settlement and request for dismissal against defendant "Whamo."

3/31/09 - Pennsylvania federal court largely denied the defendants' motion to dismiss Anthony Ciolli's complaint in Ciolli v. Iravani, but gave defendants leave to renew their motion after jurisdictional discovery.  The court also struck certain allegations from the complaint relating to settlement negotiations in the Connecticut lawsuit. 

4/30/09 - Connecticut federal court denies Matthew Ryan's motion to dismiss. 

5/21/09 - Matthew Ryan files his answer to the second amended complaint in Connecticut federal court.

9/29/09 - Plaintiffs filed a Notice of Settlement and Request for Dismissal of Action Against Defendant ":D", A.K.A. Matthew C. Ryan

10/16/09 - Plaintiffs filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal of Action Against Remaining Defendants Without Prejudice by Doe 1, Doe 2

10/23/09 - Court dismissed case