UKHigh Court Decision of Cembrit Blunn Ltd & Dansk Eternit Holdings AS v Apex Roofing
Services & Roy Leader [2007] EWHC 111, "it was confirmed that business letters could be protected
by the law of copyright and the law of breach of confidence.

The proceedings, which involved a dispute about fibre-cement roof slates, began with a
disagreement over intellectual property rights. The dispute was between a roofing manufacturer
(Cembrit) and a roofing contractor (Apex). Apex complained that the slates were not of
satisfactory quality, but Cembrit argued that this was due to them not being laid properly by
Apex. Thus a letter written by Cembrit which considered and discussed the possible settlement of
a claim which had by that time been threatened by Apex against Cembrit in relation to the slates
was circulated by Apex. The claimants (Cembrit) contended that the circulation by Apex of the
Letter constituted an infringement of copyright and misuse of confidential information.

It was held that the letter was intended for internal circulation only and was not intended for
circulation outside the Cembrit company. The court confirmed that copyright can subsist in such
correspondence and that it can subsist in business correspondence generally. The letter was found
to be an original literary work, and it possessed the necessary degree of ‘skill and labour’ in
order to be protected by copyright. Furthermore, it was held that Apex had infringed the
copyright by copying and circulating the letter."

Unfortunately, the subject on which you have been blogging is a matter of first impression in the US, but your inappropriate insults demean you and our profession. Accident lawyers should stay out of copyright infringement cases, particularly if one is just trying to generate more business by getting a higher Google ranking to sign up more accident victims. That wouldn't be your motivation, of course. Feel free to call me to discuss the matter.

John W. Dozier, Jr., Esq.
President and Founder
Dozier Internet Law, PC
 

The Dozier firm has just issued a statement in response to Public Citizens' involvement in defending spam review sites and all these issues being blogged about. Go to www.cybertriallawyer.com and there is a link on the homepage.
 

Welcome to my little corner of cyberspace...let's take a stab at a few of your comments...

UKHigh Court Decision of Cembrit Blunn Ltd & Dansk Eternit Holdings AS v Apex Roofing
Services & Roy Leader [2007] EWHC 111, "it was confirmed that business letters could be protected
by the law of copyright and the law of breach of confidence.

Well then, it's a good thing we follow American law and have the First Amendment.

your inappropriate insults demean you and our profession.

I speak only for myself, not for our profession. If you feel I have demeaned myself, I can live with that. But trying to prevent publication of your cease and desist letter was dumb, and has likely injured your client by making it a source of commentary and repetition of the claims against it. Your folly even has a name: The Streisand Effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Accident lawyers should stay out of copyright infringement cases, particularly if one is just trying to generate more business by getting a higher Google ranking to sign up more accident victims.

That's right, I'm trying to drum up medical malpractice cases, which is most of my practice, by writing about copyright. That must be it. Because people always Google "copyright law" when looking for a med mal firm.

You don't think readers will notice the old change the subject by blaming the messenenger routine? (You planning to run for office?)

The last time I checked, by the way, I hadn't surrendered my First Amendment right to speak when I was sworn in to practice law.

Feel free to call me to discuss the matter.

Thanks. I'll pass. I can already see your work.
 

The entire legal community and many of us in the direct response marketing business are laughing at Dozier and his dummies. Donald Morris is just an incompetent bully and a fool. The Dozier "firm" is a web page firm and now a INTERNET joke courtesy of Morris, a William and Mary Grad. William and Mary are both very embarrassed !
 

Eric,

Over at my blog, Curtis Weeks believes that he caught John plagiarizing -- that is, violating another's copyright -- in his above comment. This violates the terms and conditions, if not copyright, of the true author of part of John's comment.
 

The fact that Mr. Turkewitz, a mere "accident lawyer," chose to discuss this issue of public importance in his blog, despite being unrelated to his primary practice area, is demonstrative of the highest standards of professional responsibility and the duty of the legal profession to engage in public discourse so as to improve the law. Furthermore, his blog post demonstrated at least as much "‘skill and labour’" than Mr. Dozier's collection letter.

It is Mr. Dozier, not Mr. Turkewitz, whose conduct is demeaning to the legal profession.
 

I found some further information about the UK case cited here. It turns out the situation in that case is different from the present case in what is probably a crucial way. In Cembrit, the letter in question was NOT addressed to the party that published it; rather, it was internal correspondence of which the defendant somehow got hold. Thus, the case concerns the right of a third party to publish confidential business correspondence. This is potentially quite different from publication of a letter by the addressee, who is, of course, entitled to know the contents of the letter and has no duty of confidentiality to the author.
 

Personally attacking these lawyers is a ridiculous way to voice your objection to their actions. Donald Morris MAY have made a professional mistake but does not deserve to be called an "incompetent bully and a fool."
 

InventorEd.org is one of a group of organizations which I have created over the last seventeen years. We received one of Dozier Internet Law, P.C. SLAPP demand letters just days after reading about Public Citizen's response to the outrageous claim that people cannot publish Dozier Internet Law's letters.

We have a long history of fighting invention promotion fraud. We find that the people behind these companies change names and set up new fronts frequently. So when a new entity pops up a team of investigators jumps in to try and determine who they are, what their qualifications are, and if they have a verifiable track record.

Inventor-Link.com appears and reports start flowing from the UK that they are hawking their services. Attempts to identify who is behind the company turn out to be futile.

There are many other signs that this company might be questionable and a public discussion ensues.

Not long afterwards the President of our Advisory Board receives an outlandish demand letter from .

Our roots are in the commercially successful inventor community. We routinely have to do battle with large patent pirating companies. Frankly I have yet to see an invention promoter or any of their stooges who are especially bright. In this case litigation will expose the owners of Inventor-Link to public scrutiny. It seems unlikely that they have masked their identities without a good reason.

It is InventorEd's policy to create mini-sections for any promoter who makes threats so that their point of view receives broad dissemination. In the most egregious cases their service providers also get considerable exposure. Other invention promoters have made these kinds of mistakes. Invention Submission Corporation (aka InventHelp.com ) www.InventorEd.org/caution/isc/, Invent-Tech www.InventorEd.org/invent-tech/, Advent www.InventorEd.org/caution/advent and others.

In the absence of a direct attack it would have take us a year or two to have gathered enough complaints to have created Inventor-Link a mini section. Dozier has done their client Inventor-Link an incredible favor :)
www.InventorEd.org/caution/inventor-link/ Check back frequently, our people are digging deep and furiously. We will publish all so that inventors, media, and enforcement entities can judge the merits of Inventor-Link and Dozier Internet Law's arguments. God I love the disinfecting light of media exposure. Now I need to get busy on a press release.

Ronald J. Riley,
President - www.PIAUSA.org - RJR at PIAUSA.org
Executive Director - www.InventorEd.org - RJR at InvEd.org
Senior Fellow - www.PatentPolicy.org - RRiley at PatentPolicy.org
Washington, DC
Direct (202) 318-1595 - 9 am to 9 pm EST.
 

First, you seem to think that US law will govern this copyright matter. It likely will not.

Second, the decision says exactly what I said. Here are the exact findings of the court. I suggest you read the decision in its entirety. Lawyer letters are protectable, and fair use will not be a successful defense.

"The defendants referred to the decision of the Court of Appeal in Musical Fidelity Ltd v Vickers [2002] EWCA Civ 1989; [2003] FSR 50. I do not detect in this decision any reason to doubt the conclusion I have reached. The court was clearly concerned by the submission that when a person receives a solicitor's letter and shows it to another person or copies it to another person in order to complain about the acts and attitudes of the solicitor's client, he thereby commits an actionable breach of either the solicitor's or the client's copyright. It was in this context that the court expressed some surprise that copyright attached to solicitors' correspondence. Nevertheless I do not understand the court ultimately to have doubted the proposition that copyright can subsist in such correspondence and, still less, that it can subsist in business correspondence generally."

"Fair dealing for the purpose of criticism of another work does not infringe copyright, provided that it is accompanied by sufficient acknowledgment. The defendants say that this defence is available because their objective in copying the Letter and providing it to Crest and Countryside was to criticise the statements made by the claimants in the solicitors' letter of 25 November 2004. For the reasons I have already given, I do not accept that the purpose of copying the Letter was to criticise the letter of 25 November 2004 at all. In my judgment the defendants used the Letter as they did as a tactic to attempt to force the claimants to capitulate to their demands. For the reasons which I have already given, I do not believe that they were justified in so doing."

And there is plenty of US case law consistent with these principles.
 

Ronald,

Thanks for the info! I will feature your case on my blog, www.tdaxp.com.

John,

either

(a) you are not Mr. Dozier, or
(b) you are, and are providing disinformation on your case, or
(c) you are, the information you provide is accurate, and you are harming your client by telegraphing your legal strategy, or
(d) I have no idea what is going on!
 

Addendum:

My first reaction to John's comment is that he means his suit will be extra-legal in the sense that he will try to sue in Canada.

Then I remembered the Franchise Times article that mentioned one victim of a Dozier suit was mysteriously hit by a virus:

Hibbing’s next move turned his short problem into a grande one. “We felt we were being libeled and slandered on the Internet,” Hibbing said, “and we wanted to know what our legal rights were. We did a Web search and found John Dozier, (managing partner of Internet Law, P.C., in Glen Allen, Virginia).”

What happened next is something of a mystery. According to Kelly, “almost overnight,” negative posts about Cuppy’s started disappearing from other franchise Web sites. “When the anti-Cuppy’s authors asked me to delete their comments from my site, I said, ‘No. Our policy is not to take down postings, but you can retract them.’ So in the next few days I received several e-mails, including one from the picket lady, saying ‘We were wrong. The people who run Cuppy’s are great guys,’” Kelly said. Even Ben Scoble sent in a new posting, saying he’d been mistaken about Cuppy’s.

No one asked that anti-Cuppy’s postings be removed from Blue Mau Mau, said Don Sniegowski, who started the franchise blogsite Blue Mau Mau in Salt Lake City in November, 2005. But at about the same time, “someone inserted a malicious piece of software into our program, which took down our entire Web site for a 12-hour period and kept it going on and off for a few days,” he said. Sniegowski told Franchise Times this summer that he still doesn’t know who planted the software.

Kelly wrote about the Blue Mau Mau hacking episode on his Franchise Picks Web site and pondered the reasons behind the suddenly missing postings. Were the disgruntled licensees threatened with cease and desist letters? Or were they told if they posted a follow-up retraction, they’d get some of their money back? he questioned.

(The author of the article, Julie Bennett, appears to be respectable. A google search of her name brings up multiple articles in the Wall Street Journal)
 

Companies trying to quash complaints by consumers on the Internet often send bullying letters like this, demanding that criticism be taken offline. These threats are often effective against small website operators who can't afford the cost of a legal battle, especially one filed in a distant forum or another country.

Craftsmennetwork
 

Being a representative of a law firm, reading an article and blogging and commenting on legal issues has always proved to be useful. To some extent, information given on such blogs and the comments and articles has benefited the victims facing complexities in term of legal issues and helps us also update our knowledge of what is happening around and what all complexities we should expect from our future cases.. It provides a great platform to discuss experiences and share knowledge.
 

Th last post from "law firm" is comment spam. I've elected to leave it in place instead of removing it because I wrote it about it here:

Martindale-Hubbell: Now Sending Comment Spam? (How Does That Rate?)