Dozier Internet Law isn’t the only country out to sue critics on the internet: PublishAmerica has sued publisher-watchdog site Preditors and Editors.   Unfortunately, in the American legal system, it’s often so expensive to defend against nonsensical suits that many victims fold after being SLAPPED (victim of a strategic lawsuit against public participation).

Here’s to Preditors and Editors, for standing up for consumers, the market, and free speech!

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The first comment reads:

Here is the Dozier Internet Law Blog:

[url redacted by tdaxp]

Frankly, it seems pretty insightful.

and the second is:

I don’t know who is right. It looks like it might be Dozier:

[url redacted by tdaxp]

At first blanch, these are merely spam messages. The IPs of the two comments (left with the same nick and email account) are quite different… the 128.241.*.* range resolves to NTT America (a “global IP solutions company”), while the range of 207.195.240.0 to .255.255 resoles to Global Tac, LLC. Global Tac has been implemented in spam messages before. It appears that Global Tac hides behind150 different IP messages to conduct its spam campaigns, so the discrepancy between the IP addresses is smaller than it appears.

Dozier Internet Law is no stranger to spam as a means of advertising – they’ve long generated spam websites with nonsensical information. Still, escalating this to include spam comments on private blogs comes dangerously close to trespass and hacking.

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… or, maybe not: According to Public Citizen:

The hearing transcript is not online, so we cannot be sure exactly what arguments were conceded, but there is every reason to believe that the judge did NOT reject either the First Amendment or the fair use arguments – he seems to have avoided them by ruling for the one party on whose behalf they were still being pressed by the end of the hearing. Nothing supports Dozier’s claim that the case stands for the proposition that a cease and desist letter is copyrightable, not to speak of the propositions that posting of such letters is neither fair use nor protected by the First Amendment.

I will try to read the PDF of the original decision, and come to my own conclusion.

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Dozier Internet Law, P.C. has a lot of intellectual property on our site. For instance, we are the creators of all of the text on this website, and own the “look and feel” of this website. We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so. In addition, you should not make any copies of any part of this website in any way since we do not want anyone copying us. We also do not allow any links to our site without our express permission, except that you must maintain the link in our Copyright Infringement Warning Button as it is designed. The name “Dozier Internet Law, P.C.”, and similar derivatives of it, constitute our trademark and servicemark, and should not be used in any manner without our permission.

I guess Dozier isn’t a fan of Dozier Internet Law Sucks or Dozier Internet Lawsuits, then!

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The first is to note that Dozier has a new spam (bulk marketing) website out, hosted by Vator.tv. The lack of originality is striking, even for an online properties. At random, I chose one of the lines of text from the page:

company in 1994, when there were reportedly less than 1,000 websites in the

searched for it in quotes, and sure enough, came back from a google for Dozier’s homepage.

The second story consists of John Dozier’s latest blog post. As Greg of Public Citizen commented privately to me, John must really hate bloggers. Here’s an excerpt from his post:

[Journalists] are being lumped in with the bloggers in legislation before Congress that would create a bar to requiring the disclosure of confidential sources. And the bill is likely to fail, frankly, based on the inability of the journalists to explain to Congress how to draw a line between real journalists and the blogosphere. On the one hand, Congress is ready to protect confidential sources for journalists. On the other hand, extending such a privilege to the blogosphere (which by definition includes the mobosphere of miscreants and scofflaws) is unpalatable to Congress….

Why is including bloggers such a big deal? Because bloggers will publish information that is defamatory or otherwise inappropriate or illegal, and do so with claimed false attribution to a third party, and then claim privilege when asked the source. Check out the Dozier Internet Law Blogger Defamation Issues for more insight on blogger defamation.

Certainly John’s concern about innacurate journalism is valid — regardless of the medium. Just last night, TMZ broke another story of deceptive reporting by CNN. And I imagine that I would disagree with Greg of PubCit about how much legal protection reporters should have in protecting sources. Still, I am wondering what definition of the blogosphere he is using…

The last story is inspired by a pre-posting discussion I had with Brendan of I Hate Linux. I gave Brendan the link to the Dozier blog post, and he replied that I may be violating Dozier’s term of use by even privately sharing the link. I answered that I wasn’t sure. So John Dozier… may people mention the URLs of your posts to each other in private, or is that discouraged, too?

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Because Dozier has issues with intellectual honesty, I was curious how much of the javascript (the code that is executed on your computer) is original, and thus can rightfully be copyright by Dozier. In particular, there are four javascript functions defined on the page:

function CSClickReturn
function CSAction(array)
function CSAction2(fct, array)
function MPOpenPopupLite(action)

a quick trip to Google Code Search reveals numerous pages with the first three function. For instance, they are included in this “netscape bugfix code. Dozier does not acknowledge this lifting, however.

The law firm is a bit more honest with “MPOpenPopupLite,” where they provide this acknowledgement:

OpenPopUpLite 2.0.1 action by Nate Baldwin, www.mindpalette.com, copyright 2004

On a standard website, of course, this would be no big deal. But Dozier’s pecular terms of use (see a description over at Public Citizen) apperas to claim exclusive rights over other people’s work.

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The case featured all the usual nonsense from Dozier. Just like they publiclly squabble with blogs while DirectBuy’s reputation suffers, they issued press releases in the SecureComputer case. In separate suits, Microsoft and the State of Washington sued Secure Computer,” so Secure Computer made the mistake of contracting Dozier Internet Law.

If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few days, you know what a mistake that is.

Secure Computer’s nightwmare continues, as the Microsoft case drags on. But SecureComputer already had to pull its product from the market and pay one million dollars to the State of Washington.

In a discussion forum on this blog, former Dozier law firm employees complained about the bad working environment at the company. With victories like SecureComputer, Cuppy’s Coffee, and DirectBuy under their belt, no wonder Dozier employees are not happy!

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Everything that Gary writes is so good is is hard to know what to excerpt. I hope he doesn’t mind a longer-than-usual blockquote, simply because everything is so well done:

Direct Buy, not liking the fact that infomercialscams.com was letting people post their complaints about it, had Dozier Internet Law, P.C., send a cease and desist letter (PDF) demanding that the reports be removed, as well as demanding unspecified compensation.

The letter claims that the following are “defamatory statements”:

• “Direct Buy Nightmare” — www.informercialscams.com;
• * “all scams are posted uncensored!” — www.infomercialscams.com;
• * “You are reporting the following SCAM” — www.infomercialscams.com; and
• * “Recently, we noticed a sudden influx of 4 and 5 star ratings for the Direct Buy
  program … We don’t know if Direct Buy is behind this or not. But we do have our suspicious given the fact that the reviews came from the SAME LOCATION, say the same thing, and highlight points that most customers wouldn’t be concerned with.” — www.informercialblog.com

The letter doesn’t deny the specific scamming activity which Direct Buy is accused of, yet it categorically states that the last claim is “utterly false and without merit.” How does Dozier know that there was no such influx from a single location? Does he have access to the site’s logs?

Just by the way, Dozier Internet Law presumably would regard me as a “letter pirate” for having quoted the above text.

(Perhaps the reason I like Gary’s post is so much is that we think the same — my reaction was pretty similar in my first post, DirectBuy and Dozier Internet Law SLAPPS Infomercial Scams.com).

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The Ars Technica article focuses mostly on the contributions of Public Citizen and Willam Patry (who, I learned, is also Google’ top copyright lawyer).

One of the hardest things about following the story is how quickly people are coming forward. Wicked Boring discusses this as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, New York Attorney Malpractice Blog quotes an length an earlier essay, Citizen Media Law Project is not impressed, and Curtis (who previously discovered by John Dozier is a plagiarist) tries to throw cold water on collective non-violenct self defense

• Free Speech and Copyright
• Comment on ‘Lawfare and Public Participation’
• Comment on ‘Lawfare Backlash’

That’s it for now!

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Coincidentally, the story of Dozier acting as hired thugs for DirectBuy has been picked up by Plagiarism Today. The article goes into some depth, link to the four factors of fair use and is very worth reading.

By suspicion, the open letter posted on Dozier’s home page cites cases first uncovered by Curtis Weeks, as I discussed in my preliminary case study. It is these stories that let Dozier post “UK Court finds that business dispute demand letter protected by copyright laws” as “Latest News” at the firm’s homepage. But ultimately, such cases may be straightforward to find, so nothing can be proven.

Indisputably,, the rant by John Dozier posted on New York Personal Injury Law Blog includes material lifted, without attribution, from lawdit.co.uk (Curtis found this, too!).

Why anyone would want to hire a lawyer that’s so apt destroying their client’s reputation and violationg the copyright of others is beyond me.

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