[thelist] Looking for Input

David Kutcher david_kutcher at hotmail.com
Mon Apr 29 17:01:03 CDT 2002


> In the past week, the attorneys for Realty Executives have pretty much
> conceeded that they may not be able to prove damages and that we have
> complied with their demands. However, they are demanding that we pay
> their expenses in excess of $20,000 for this action and of all things,
> make sure that our site does not come up before any of their realty
> sites in any search engine results.

So let me get this straight: they try to sue you and waste lots of time and
money doing this, realize they dont have a case, and now want you to pay for
their lawyers?

HA!  Is this week the "stupidity of people with lawyers" week?

Last time I read, google was able to deflect all responsibility not only for
the results of a search, but the order of the results as well (unless money
was paid for placement).  Seems to be the same thing here.

You mentioned something along the lines of the client was using not a
domain, but a subdomain or just a subdirectory... she doesn't have any
rights to that.  The owner of the domain is the only one with ownership of
the name or anything related to it.

If Realty Executives had a problem with traffic going to this directory, why
didn't they just redirect all traffic from the directory to their site,
taking advantage of the traffic as opposed to fighting it?

This is where I get confused:

"A year ago, the agent relocated to another state and gave up the rights
to the url she was using. Since it was so successful, we offered it to
other real estate agents. The local Realty Executives agent discovered
we had leased it to someone else and approached them with threats of a
lawsuit."

You offered the old subdirectory/subdomain to someone?  Who owns the domain
in question?  That's the only sticking point I see.

Just for the record, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

David
www.confluentforms.com




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