Legal Information

The Law Offices of N.M. Gehi, P.C., a law firm specializing in immigration, sued us for alleged defamation/libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress allegedly caused by negative reviews about Plaintiff on our site. Prior to the case being removed to the United States District Court, Gehi sought a temporary restraining order against us, requesting that we stopped “editing or publishing any posts

The Randazza Legal Group, representing us in this case, argued, in particular, that Plaintiff’s claims are barred under the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (the “CDA” or “Section 230”). Hereby, the defense stated that “…none of these claims relate at all to Defendant’s business practices or how the website is operated. They are premised entirely on statements authored solely by the John Does. Defendant is thus immune from suit under Section 230…”. The defense further argued that corporations cannot suffer emotional distress because “…a corporate plaintiff is an inanimate object…”.

Plaintiff dropped its lawsuit, and the case was voluntarily dismissed on October 5, 2017, two weeks after its removal to the United States District Court.

Section 230 has once proven its role as a landmark piece of the US Internet legislation, and we at PissedConsumer.com added an important asset to our legal victories

In Roca, a weight loss product manufacturer sued us on grounds that comments posted by third parties and appearing on PissedConsumer.com constituted, among other things, “tortuous interference” because we knowingly maintained negative posts on our website in violation of a “gag clause” – which we maintain is unlawful – appearing in Roca’s sales’ contracts with its customers. Keep in mind that this case was in Florida, which is much more friendly towards defamation plaintiffs than most jurisdictions. Even the Judge saw the law as so clear and compelling that she ruled in our favor. After more than a year of highly contentious litigation in which the parties’ filed multiple motions to dismiss, the Court ultimately hung its hat on a singular dispositive legal issue — Section 230 — in the face of Roca’s utterly meritless legal theories and ruled that PissedConsumer.com and its affiliate entities must be afforded complete and total immunity under the applicable federal statute. One by one, the Court dismissed each of Roca’s nine separate causes of action, serving as merely the most recent reminder that even in the face of perceived creative lawyering, a would-be plaintiff cannot defeat the clear and unambiguous law that surrounds the protection afforded under Section 230. Of course, certain legal commentators — some of whom are our friends — saw this inevitable outcome more than a year earlier. You can read all about their on-point predictions here. In Roca, the Plaintiff seemed to believe that if they caused us to incur fees, at some point we would simply consider it to be a good business move to "just take it down." However, we happily spent well in excess of $500,000 in fees defending this case. It is not simply stubbornness on our part. Although we are stubborn, there is also a smart business reason, and a principal legal reason, for us to hold that line. In the event that companies could simply suppress negative reviews by threatening lawsuits, the consumer review business would cease to exist. Further, if companies did not fight back at attempts to litigate in contravention of 47 U.S.C. § 230, then that very strong protection would quickly erode.

In this case, Woodbridge sought pre-suit discovery of the identity of certain posters in connection with comments appearing on PissedConsumer.com. Woodbridge alleged that the posts at issue were defamatory and therefore actionable under New York law. The New York trial court, in the denying Woodbridge’s application for pre-action disclosure from PissedConsumer, held that “even if a cause of action for defamation were otherwise stated, it is necessary to considering the writing as a whole, as well as the over-all context of the publication, to determine whether the reasonable reader would have believed that the challenged statements were conveying facts about the libel plaintiff.” With this as backdrop, the court went on to find that when viewed in context, a reasonable reader would perceive the postings appearing on our website as merely pure opinion, and not fact, such that no claim for defamation under New York law could be said to exist. The trial court’s decision was later affirmed in all respects by the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department a year and a half later.

Financial services company deVere Group sued PissedConsumer.com, our holding company and our principals, for alleged trademark infringement under U.S. federal law because of the appearance of “deVere Group” together with various suffixes it claimed ownership of on our website. We moved to dismiss the action on grounds that it lacked merit as a matter of law. In granting our motion to dismiss very early in the litigation the court agreed, finding that, as a matter of law, no “likelihood of success” could be said to exist between deVere’s trademark interests — such as they are — and the appearance of its trade name on our website. Most notably, the district court found that under the applicable test utilized by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, deVere’s services were not likely to be confused with those offered by PissedConsumer.com because the parties do not compete with one another. Moreover, the court also noted that “gripe sites,” like PissedConsumer.com which incorporate derogatory or critical terms alongside a company’s trade name, in both the domain name and the website contexts, do not present a likelihood of confusion for purposes of the U.S. federal trademark act. This decision, and the soundness of its outcome, is discussed here and here.

In one of our first cases that attempted to (mis)use federal trademark law as a workaround Section 230’s prohibition on inconsistent state law claims, Ascentive, a software developer focused on consumer products designed to optimize personal computer performance and Classic Brands, a “sleep product manufacturer” (read mattresses) and wholesaler, teamed up in the fall of 2010 in an effort to stop PissedConsumer from displaying negative consumer reviews on our website.

To enhance their bogus trademark claims — the linchpins of their complaints — Ascentive and Classic argued that certain technological features utilized on our website supported a finding of trademark infringement. (More recently, Roca Labs, as discussed in more detail above, tried this same approach by arguing that our publishing of posts via Twitter, our use of “handles” and the modification of links constituted “authorship,” such that our use of these technologies invalidated the immunity provided under Section 230. However, neither the Roca or Ascentive court, as both of these decisions explain, found these arguments persuasive.)

In thoroughly denying Ascentive and Classic’s application for a preliminary injunction, the court “sliced and diced” the range of federal and common law trademark-related claims that considered Internet subdomains, metatags, and the placement of Internet advertisements as indicative of PissedConsumer’s purported wrongdoing. Central to the Ascentive court’s likelihood of confusion analysis was, once again, the complete and utter inability on the part of any reasonable visitor to our website to become seriously “confused” between the criticisms directed toward Ascentive and Classic appearing on our website, and the products these companies offered in the marketplace. Accordingly, in what is now “old news” (but was immensely reassuring at the time), the Ascentive court determined that no likelihood of confusion could exist.

So too did the Ascentive court make short work of Ascentive and Classic’s claims of tortuous interference; it determined Section 230 provided a complete and total bar to these state-based tort claims.

With the crushing defeat Ascentive and Classic experienced, which included the court’s total rejection of an ill-conceived federal racketeering allegation almost as quickly as the claim was hastily put together, this decision was widely heralded as one of the most important Internet-related decisions of 2011. Read all about why.