Here are the four
letters (the letter runnersworld.com’s lawyer sent
us, our reply, the lawyers second letter, our 2nd reply) that detail
the growing legal fight between Letsrun.com and Runnersworld.com (Oh wait,
according to their lawyer, us even writing Runnersworld.com is against the
law).
MALCOLM
J. GROSS PAUL
A. McGINLEY DONALD LaBARRE, JR. J.
JACKSON EATON, III MICHAEL
A. HENRY PATRICK
J. REILLY WILLIAM
J. FRIES ANNE
K. MANLEY SUSAN
ELLIS WILD ELIZABETH
R. GRAVER ALLEN
I. TULLAR JOHN
F. GROSS KIMBERLY
G. KRUPKA ROBERT
A. ALPERT K. A. SPOTTS-KIMMEL |
GROSS, MCGINLEY, LABARRE
& EATON, LLP ATTORNEYS AT LAW P.O. __________ (***) ***-**** TELEFAX (***) ***-**** E-MAIL *@****.com Direct number: (***) ***-**** |
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*NOTE WE REMOVED THE PHONE
NUMBER AND EMAIL ADDRESSES AS WE DON’T WANT ANYONE TO HARASS RUNNERSWORLD.COM’S
LAWFIRM OR LAWYER.*
Robert
Johnson (robertjohnson@letsrun.com)
Weldon
Johnson (weldonjohnson@letsrun.com)
Dear
Messrs. Johnson:
Please be advised that our firm represents Rodale
Inc., publisher of Runner's World Magazine and runnersworld.com. A review of your website indicates that an
article published on Rodale's runnersworld.com website, the Peter Snell
Interview, has been republished on letsrun.com without authorization by
Rodale.
The article has clearly been copied, verbatim,
without permission. This unauthorized
copying by letsrun.com of Rodale's copyrighted content constitutes
copyright infringement.
The purpose of this letter is to demand that letsrun.com
immediately cease and desist the unauthorized and infringing publication of the
Runner's World Peter Snell article and any other Rodale content copied by ;etsrun.com
without permission from Rodale Inc. We
demand removal of the aforementioned article and any other such content on or
before
If letsrun.com does not remove the article by
that date and fails to provide Rodale with assurances that no future acts of
infringement will occur, Rodale is prepared to take any and all necessary steps
to protect and enforce its rights under the United States Copyright Act.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this urgent
matter.
Very
truly yours,
ALLEN
I. TULLAR
AIT:kmb
cc: Claudia
Morf, Sr. V.P./CFO
Amby
Burfoot
Paul
A. McGinley, Esquire
Our Initial
Reply To Them
LetsRun.com
www.LetsRun.com – 2700 Woodlands Village Blvd.
May 13, 2002
To: Claudia Morf, Sr. V.P./CFO (**@rodale.com)
Amby Burfoot (***@rodale.com)
Paul A. McGinley, Esquire (****@GMLE.COM)
Please be advised that we received a letter from your
law firm indicating that our website – LetsRun.com – is violating
We find it very ironic that you are threatening to
sue us over a visitor’s posting of a single item of runnersworld.com
copyrighted material on the LetsRun.com message board. Over the weekend, we did investigative research
into the runnersword.com message boards and find no fewer than four blatant and
much more extensive cases of copyright infringement of LetsRun.com material.
Let’s compare the offenses. The one instance of
copyrighted material that was posted on our site was an interview of
approximately 900 words and no where did the posted material on our board
clearly indicate that it was copyrighted material from another site. In
comparison, the four instances of copyright infringement of our material on
your site totals more than 40,500 words and three of the four cases clearly
include the term “Copyright
© LetsRun.com All Rights Reserved” on your website. Moreover, the one small instance of copyright
infringement that allegedly occurred on our site took place on
We are not lawyers and really
can’t afford to hire any at this time so we are relying on your lawyers’
expertise to help us here. According to your lawyers’ definition of
copyright infringement, runnersworld.com has for the last 72 days allowed
approximately 40,500 words of LetsRun.com copyrighted material to appear on its
website in clear violation of
We therefore are contemplating filing a counter lawsuit for greater damages. The amount of our copyrighted material that
has been stolen from us and posted on your website is more than 45 times
greater than the amount of similar material from your site that was posted on
our site (45,500 words versus 900). Moreover, our copyrighted material has
remained on your site for 72 times as long than your
material remained on ours (72 days and counting versus 1 day). Thus the damages
inflicted on us by Rodale, Inc and runnersworld.com are 3,240 times (45*72=3,240)
greater than the damages we inflicted on you.
Now to try to estimate a value of
the damages inflicted on both parties.
Considering that we believe you pay $30 dollars per interview, we think
that the minimum value of the damage we caused you is $30 dollars. Likely, it’s much more as we know of other
running sites that pay approximately $75 dollars per interview. Thus we feel
that we owe you somewhere between $30 and $75 in damages. In comparison, our calculations indicate that runnersworld.com owes us
a minimum of $97,200 and a maximum of $243,000 in compensatory damages since
our damages are 3,240 times greater than yours (and counting).
We want to thank your lawyers for letting us know about this great potential
revenue source. We were struggling to
make ends meet, train for the 2004 Olympics full-time, and operate LetsRun.com
all at the same time. Thankfully your
magazine, a major force in the running community, has come to our rescue. We
will definitely give you praise if we make the 2004 Olympic team. Thank you for
your support.
We hope you do sue us.
See you in court,
Robert and Weldon Johnson
PS. Actually, we just
received a follow up letter from your lawyer and it appears we are going to
have to write you guys another letter. He claims the copyright infringement of
the Peter Snell argument was not only the message board post but also the
simple linking that occurs on our front-page. That’s ridiculous (and something
that you do all the time on Runnersworld.com) but we’ll get back to you on that
one. Would you please let your lawyer know what you
are doing on your own website?
PPS.
Next time don’t you think it would be a lot easier (and cheaper from your
perspective) to send us an email letting us know that
someone on our largely unmoderated boards has
violated
PPPS. Additionally,
in the future, please let us know where specifically on our large site the
infringement has occurred. This is actually a stipulation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – “Identification
of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of
infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be
disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service
provider to locate the material.” (emphasis added by us)
We have given you this same
courtesy. On the following 87 pages (no
joke – it’s that long), you will find the instances of copyright infringement
of our material that occurs on runnersworld.com as well as the links to where
to find the material so you can take it down.
CC: ALLEN
I. TULLAR - ATTORNEYS AT LAW at GROSS, MCGINLEY, LABARRE
& EATON,
LLP
NOTE: WE DIDN’T
WANT TO MAKE YOU DOWNLOAD A 89 PAGE DOCUMENT SO WE’VE
JUST LISTED THE URL’S OF THE THREADS WE COPY AND PASTED HERE.
1st Thread
–
2nd Thread:
http://rwforums.rodale.com/thread.jsp?forum=5&thread=33371&message=249959&redirect=true&hilite=true&q=letsrun.com
3rd
Thread:
http://rwforums.rodale.com/thread.jsp?forum=4&thread=33370&message=249956&redirect=true&hilite=true&q=letsrun.com
4th Thread:
Started
Letter
#2 From The Runnersworld.com Lawyer
MALCOLM
J. GROSS PAUL
A. McGINLEY DONALD LaBARRE, JR. J.
JACKSON EATON, III MICHAEL
A. HENRY PATRICK
J. REILLY WILLIAM
J. FRIES ANNE
K. MANLEY SUSAN
ELLIS WILD ELIZABETH
R. GRAVER ALLEN
I. TULLAR JOHN
F. GROSS KIMBERLY
G. KRUPKA ROBERT
A. ALPERT K. A. SPOTTS-KIMMEL |
GROSS, MCGINLEY, LABARRE
& EATON, LLP ATTORNEYS AT LAW P.O. __________ (***) ***-**** TELEFAX (***) ***-**** E-MAIL *@****.com Direct number: (***) ***-**** |
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*NOTE WE REMOVED THE PHONE
NUMBER AS WE DON’T WANT ANYONE TO HARASS RUNNERSWORLD.COM’S LAWFIRM OR LAWYER.*
Robert Johnson (robertjohnson@letsrun.com)
Dear Mr. Johnson:
I am responding to the voice mail
you left
By way of clarification, my original letter referenced a Rodale article featured on letsrun.com. The hyperlink, when clicked on, produced a verbatim copy of an interview with Peter Snell originally published on runnersworld.com. That interview, reproduced in its entirety, was stripped of all Rodale ads and navigational information and aids. Contrary to your assertion, to the extent that the entire article was reproduced by letsrun.com, that republication hardly constitutes fair use.
Furthermore, it appears that the interview continues to run on the letsrun.com website and now appears below the fold under the heading "A Must Read!!!!!". Again, clicking on the hyperlink fails to take viewers directly to Rodale's runnersworld.com website. Indeed, use of the Rodale trademark runnersworld.com by letsrun.com is also infringing. Letsrun.com has not created a hyperlink to Rodale's runnersworld.com website. Instead, viewers who click on the hyperlink are actually prevented from reaching the runnersworld.com website and are denied access to its services and message. In short, letsrun.com has appropriated Rodale's trademark in order to purvey its own Internet services - the letsrun.com website to an audience intending to access Rodale's website.
The actions of letsrun.com clearly constitute copyright and trademark infringement and unfair competition. Demand is hereby made that letsrun.com immediately remove any and all Rodale
content
from its website and remove all hyperlinks utilizing Rodale trademarks by close
of business tomorrow,
Very truly yours,
ALLEN I. TULLAR
AIT:kmb
cc: Claudia Morf, Sr. V.P./CFO
Amby Burfoot
Paul A. McGinley, Esquire
Our
2nd Letter - To Their Lawyer
LetsRun.com
www.LetsRun.com – 2700 Woodlands Village Blvd.
May 14, 2002
To: ALLEN
I. TULLAR - ATTORNEY AT
LAW at GROSS, MCGINLEY, LABARRE & EATON, LLP
CC: Claudia Morf, Sr. V.P./CFO (**@rodale.com)
Amby Burfoot (**@rodale.com)
Paul A. McGinley, Esquire (**@GMLE.COM)
Dear Mr. Tullar:
We are responding to the letter
you wrote on
Let us correct a few errors in
your most-recent letter. For some reason you fail to understand that we have
not reproduced the runnersworld.com Peter Snell Interview on the LetsRun.com
site. You stated, “Contrary to your
assertion, to the extent that the entire article was reproduced by letsrun.com,
that republication hardly constitutes fair use.” This statement is false because the Peter
Snell Interview isn’t being reproduced by letsrun.com at all. We are simply linking to the Interview on Runnersworld.com’s website (http://www.runnersworld.com/home/0,1300,1-0-0-1963-1-0-P,00.html).
It is not being reproduced on LetsRun.com as the above hyperlink attests.
Therefore your assertions that “clicking on the hyperlink fails to take viewers
directly to Rodale's runnersworld.com website” and “Letsrun.com
has not created a hyperlink to Rodale's runnersworld.com website” are
false. Clicking on the hyperlink does
take one to the runnersworld.com web-site – it specifically takes them to the
Peter Snell Interview on Runnersworld.com. More specifically, it takes them to
the “Printer Friendly” version of the Peter Snell Interview.
Additionally, you also stated that the Peter Snell Interview we linked to “was stripped of all Rodale ads and navigational information and aids.” If it was stripped of any ads or navigational information, it was stripped of them by Runnersworld.com not LetsRun.com. Runnersworld.com decided that the “Printer Friendly” version of the Interview wouldn’t contain any ads. LetsRun.com didn’t make this decision.
You also even go as far as to say that our “use of the Rodale trademark runnersworld.com by letsrun.com is also infringing.” That’s utterly false. We specifically used the trademark “runnersworld.com” so that no one would think the article came from us. Our use of the term “runnersworld.com” is the complete opposite of copyright infringement. We are purposely using the trademark to show that the article was not written by us and is runnerworld.com’s work. We could remove the term runnersworld.com, but then you would probably be on our case for trying to pass the article off as our own.
We find it extremely ironic that you claim that our linking directly to
an article or interview on another website, in this case runnersworld.com,
is a violation of
Additionally, it has come to our attention that Runnersworld.com has at least
on one occasion “deep linked” to a page on LetsRun.com in exactly the same
fashion that we have “deep linked” to the Peter Snell Interview. On
As Runnersworld.com recognizes, linking directly to another web-site’s article
or interview is not a violation of copyright law. It’s unfortunate that you,
their lawyer, do not recognize this fact.
The case: Ticketmaster Corp., et al.
v. Tickets.Com, Inc. (U.S.
District Court, Central District of Californiam,
“Further, hyperlinking does not itself
involve a violation of the Copyright Act (whatever it may do for other claims)
since no copying is involved. The customer is automatically transferred to the
particular genuine web page of the original author. There is no deception in
what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get
reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.”
We clearly are not violating
If you truly are interested in protecting the copyright of runnersworld.com (which you should be) then we urge you to visit the following web-site: www.mariusbakken.com. If you visit the site, you will see that this particular website reproduces copyright material in its entirety throughout its site. In fact, the Peter Snell Interview is reproduced in its entirety on that site currently (see http://www.mariusbakken.com/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?newsid1021086912,59276). We know copyright infringement when we see it and hope your financial resources can put a stop to it when it legitimately occurs.
We wish you luck in pursuing the
above mentioned instance of copyright infringement but hope that you will stop
harassing us as we are law abiding entrepreneurs. (We’re not sure why Runnersworld.com hasn’t notified you of the
copyright infringement on
mariusbakken.com as they have featured it as their link of the
day in the past and must be aware of the blatant copyright violations. Our only
guess is they must not view www.mariusbakken.com as a threatening competitor
and thus they don’t care. Perhaps, Runnersworld.com and Rodale, Inc only care
to use their vast resources to squash upstart competitors.)
In conclusion, we are pretty much
mystified as why we keep getting threatening letters from you on behalf of
Runnersworld.com as we have never done anything that they themselves do not
do. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the
world-wide web where deep linking is done by thousands if not millions each and
every day. We will not stop deep linking to articles or interviews to
runnersworld.com or any other site per your request. Deep linking is clearly is protected “fair
use” of copyrighted material as established by legal precedent and we are not
willing to forsake this first amendment right.
In the last month, The Dallas Morning News has threatened to sue a site, barkingdogs.org, for deep linking to its articles. The threat has received much attention in the press because it, much like your own threat of a lawsuit, goes against the very nature of the world wide web. The web is a world wide web of links, not a world wide straight line to a homepage, and legal precedent and Runnersworld.com’s own website support deep linking.
Public Citizen, the Ralph Nader, public advocacy group has agreed to provide pro-bono the legal services for Barkingdogs.org should The Dallas Morning News actually file a lawsuit. But no one actually anticipates a lawsuit, since the DallasNews.com (The Dallas Morning News’ web-site) is apparently just trying to intimidate another website. The threat by The Dallas Morning News has garnered coverage in the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/technology/06WEB.html), AbcNews.com (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/business/DailyNews/links020513.html), Wired.com (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52213-1-13,00.html), and Dotcomscoop.com (http://www.dotcomscoop.com/050202.html#belo) among others.
(Maybe you shouldn’t read those links because if we understand your argument correctly, we are violating copyright by providing the above links above to you.)
We urge you to read the letters from Public Citizen to the Dallas Morning News’ lawyers: http://www.barkingdogs.org/News_Features/May2002/05092002_citizen/05092002_citizen.shtml explaining the legal precedent on Barkingdogs.org side.
If you do not agree with this letter, then we urge someone from Runnersworld.com to call us as it’s much easier (and less expensive) to solve things without involving lawyers. Tell Amby Burfoot to call us as we’ve gotten along with him great in the past. Our phone # is 928-***-****. If not, we’re looking forward to getting Public Citizen behind our cause.
Sincerely yours,
Robert and Weldon Johnosn
LetsRun.com
PS. In follow up to the earlier letter we sent you, please not we have found another instance where copyrighted letsrun.com material has been posted on the runnersworld.com message boards without our permission. An article from our April Fools edition has been illegally posted on the Runnersworld.com message board. It can be found at:
http://rwforums.rodale.com/thread.jsp?forum=4&thread=38773&message=296996
Attachment 1
Examples of Runnersworld.com directly linking to other websites’ copyrighted
articles.
(The examples below were copied from the runnersworld.com website verbatim for
demonstrative purposes)
From: http://www.runnersworld.com/home/0,1300,1-0-0-ZNEWS,00.html
at 6:16 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on May 13, 2002.
Attachment 2
Examples Of Runnersworld.com directly linking to
LetsRun.com
Copied verbatim for example purposes.
From: http://www.runnersworld.com/dailynew/archives/2001/August/010802.html
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