Complaining couple may set precedent: Web site could define bounds of online speech
We’ve all had it happen to us. We purchase a good or a service that turns out to be something less than what it was advertised to be. The end result is an unsatisfied customer. It used to be that the audience for an unsatisfied customer, especially a customer of a large company, was limited. There just weren’t that many places one could go to lodge a complaint.
Now, with the advent of the Internet, one has a worldwide audience constantly at one’s fingertips. This is a good thing, as far as freedom of speech is concerned. However, as many are finding out, freedom of speech is no match for a large company attended to by a phalanx of well-funded attorneys. Just ask the Townsends.
DALLAS, GA. - When Alan and Linda Townsend were unhappy with their home’s sprayed-on siding, the frustrated couple launched a Web site to give other dissatisfied customers a forum.
Visitor postings to the Web site said the product, Spray on Siding, cracked, bubbled and buckled. For their efforts, the Townsends got slapped with a lawsuit by the product’s maker.
The case may help shape the boundaries of online speech.
Companies routinely go after individuals when they feel people are maligning them on the Internet. And often, legal scholars say, the Web site’s owners don’t fight back at all.
In this dispute, North Carolina-based Alvis Coatings, which supplied the siding product used in the Townsends’ $16,721 project, claims the couple’s Web site infringes on the company’s trademarks, defames its product and intentionally misleads and confuses consumers. Alvis is seeking more than $75,000 in damages in addition to unspecified punitive damages and attorney fees.
“We could lose everything, including the house, and still be in debt,” Alan Townsend said.
Of course, there is more than simple freedom of speech at stake here. Companies will quite often file suit against a criticism site alleging trademark infringement. In my mind, I would presume this to mean that a criticism site employs the logo or other trademarked symbols of the company in question (slogans, product names, etc.). Would a site devoid of these trademarked symbols be free from this sort of legal action? Or do companies and corporations have the legal right to go after anyone who questions their business practices, no matter how legitimate those questions might be?
Law expert Doug Isenberg of Georgia State University said the courts need to better define free-speech issues for the Internet, and this case could help.
The complaint filed by Alvis alleges that the name of the Townsends’ Web site, spraysiding.com, “is confusingly similar” to the official Alvis site, sprayonsiding.com.
Courts have provided greater protection to noncommercial sites, such as the Townsends’, “but it is not so cut-and-dry to say, if it is noncommercial use it’s acceptable,” Isenberg said.
Companies have threatened scores of criticism sites with trademark infringement and have lost many of the cases that have gone to court, said Wendy Seltzer, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. But most of the time, she said, the site owners agree to stop before being sued.
It will be interesting to see where the precedents lead. Will those dissatified with products or services be allowed to voice their dissent on the Internet, or will business interests succeed in “protecting” their names, products, and business practices from being held up to scrutiny in cyberspace?
This is no small question for those of us interested in freedom of speech on the Internet. When companies are allowed to use their superior financial and legal firepower to intimidate dissatified customers simply because they dare to give voice to that dissatisfaction, consumers lose a tool for holding companies accountable. Of course, one might argue that there needs to be a reasonable, agreed-upon standard in place, but who decides? And what, exactly, IS reasonable? Stay tuned….
