R.E.M. once sang about "the end of the world as we know it," but Michael Stipe & Co. never suspected that the brat-loving, cheese-eating, grain-growing Midwest might be the source of the world-ending scourge. But a pair of recent federal court cases coming from Wisconsin and Illinois have threatened to turn the most primitive functionality of the web—the hyperlink—into an "ask permission before linking" system.

Perhaps the full lyric should run, "It's the end of the web as we know it, and I feel fine," except that it's hard to feel to great about the end of the web.

We've got trouble, right here in Brat City!

First up is Jennifer Reisinger (of the Sheboygan Reisingers), a web designer from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The town is right on Lake Michigan, perhaps a bit down on its luck, but a quintessentially Midwestern town, the kind of thing where no mayor would start harassing a private citizen over a link she had posted to a web site. Right?

Reisinger filed a federal case in late August against Sheboygan after the town attorney contacted her and—not appearing to have a totally complete understanding of this Internet thing—advised Sheboygan's mayor that it would be acceptable for the town to ask Reisinger to cease and desist. Her offense: putting a link to the city police department on the main page of her web design firm, Brat City Web Design.

It wasn't the attorney's idea, however. The mayor's office had instituted the inquiry, perhaps because Reisinger had previously been involved in an attempt to recall the mayor. After the attorney sent Reisinger a letter, she pulled the link, though her court filing says she also "expressed her surprise that the City of Sheboygan had a concern relative to a local business sharing a taxpayer-funded web site with visitors to the city."

Reisinger was then contacted by the police department, which was investigating the situation. The news found its way to the local paper, and Reisinger "experienced death threats, other threats to her personal safety, including vulgar and obscene comments and letters left at her residence." It got so bad that she installed video cameras and a burglar alarm. She also saw a 53 percent dropoff in annual income, which she links to the controversy.

Only after she (finally) retained an attorney did the city notify her in late 2007 that it was revoking the cease-and-desist letter. She is suing Sheboygan for violating her right to free speech.





The link that spawned a lawsuit

The court documents we looked at showed that the town viewed the whole matter a bit differently. While the cease-and-desist order was in fact issued, Sheboygan never threatened Reisinger with a penalty for noncompliance. Further, the police investigation was not into Reisinger's contact, but an internal investigation into the actions of a police officer who had apparently given "permission" at one point for Reisinger to create such a link.

The city also claims that Reisinger contacted Wisconsin talk show bigwig Mark Belling to publicize her plight and that she also "contacted the news media to garner publicity and to embarrass the named defendants."

Finally, the revocation of the cease-and-desist letter wasn't due to Reisinger's attorney, but to the fact that the city attorney "had determined that there was no clearly established law applicable to web site linking." We would have imagined an attorney would look into this before issuing such a bizarre letter, but this is probably why we are not lawyers.

So, case closed? Not really. Reisinger is going ahead with the suit and demands compensation from the city. Both sides have filed arguments in the case.

Let's keep that public information a little less public

But while Sheboygan has backed down, well-connected Chicago law firm Jones Day has not. The firm filed a federal suit of its own against BlockShopper.com, a small outfit run out of a Chicago apartment. The site offers real estate information for particular urban communities, showing for instance that a prominent real estate lawyer bought that condo on 46th Avenue. Or, more to the point, that Jones Day had purchased homes/condos/apartments on Chicago's north side.

The information on these sales is public record, and publicizing public records would seem to be pretty much ok, right? But Jones Day sued BlockShopper for the odd charge of trademark dilution.

BlockShopper used pictures of Jones Day lawyers grabbed from the Jones Day web site, and it linked to the site, but Jones Day doesn't seem worried about this. Instead, our review of the Jones Day complaint shows that the issue cited is "confusion"—the claim is that people visiting BlockShopper and seeing the pages in question might assume that it was somehow officially related to Jones Day. This is... unlikely (see our example from the site).



BlockShopper.com

All of this led lawyer Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen to conclude, "It thus appears that Jones Day is a serial abuser of the trademark laws to suppress commentary that it does not like. Bullies like this need to be resisted."

Robert Ambrogi of Legal Blog Watch concluded his own writeup on the case by saying, "In this age of electronically enhanced transparency, this whole dust-up reflects a sentiment I encounter time and again: 'We like our public records to be public—just not too public.'"

But BlockShopper has agreed to a temporary restraining order and has pulled the information in question. The case could potentially determine whether BlockShopper has the right to use the Jones Day name on its pages and to link to the law firm's site; if it does not, the US could quickly find itself deluged beneath a flood of similar lawsuits.

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