Why Be Polite when You Can Be Nasty?

Update:  The Little Guy Clobbers the Corporation, Again

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"We'll just get the lawyer to send them a letter. That should put them in the mood to settle this quickly."

How many times have you heard words to that effect in business (or your personal life, if you know a lot of A-type folks)?

In the case of real estate development company Taubman, their decision to intimidate Hank Mishkoff is a textbook case of failing to pursue a mutually beneficial solution in favour of a legal dispute.

Mishkoff received a typical "drop what you're doing or we'll make you suffer" letter from Julie Greenberg, of a patent and copyright law firm, on behalf of Taubman, the owners of a new mall that Mishkoff had created a fan web site for. (Yes, people will create fan web sites about just about anything.)

Instead of running and hiding, Mishkoff cut through the legal crap and tried to get the firm to explain exactly what he was doing that was so terrible. His Taubman Sucks web site is a painfully detailed recounting of the nasty bully tactics the law firm used to attack the fan web site and force its removal. (Warning: unless you have several hours to spare, browse through the Condensed Version on his site.)

As Seth Godin succinctly points out, Ms. Greenberg would have accomplished her firm's goals at very little cost if she had just been polite in her first contact with Mishkoff. Instead, Taubman must have spent hundreds of thousands in legal fees to pursue a case that had little chance of succeeding on its legal merits, and that Mishkoff agreed to settle for $1,000 early on in the battle.

Aggressiveness has its place, but politeness and a conciliatory manner are a good starting point, particularly when dealing with consumer evangelists for your product (in this case a shopping mall). As Godin says, you can always be mean later, if politeness doesn't work.

This story is burning around the Internet and blogs lately. The end result: Mishkoff and his godsend lawyer Paul Levy  will be known as the Davids who used truth and the law to defeat an ugly Goliath; and for the next decade people will say, "Oh, you're that Julie Greenberg" when they meet the woman who pissed off a little guy who used the Web to publicize his cause.  As for Taubman, this latest boost of negative publicity for a case several years old should boost the Taubman Sucks web site up a few notches in search engines, rightly tarnishing their reputation even more than it already has been.

Comments

[Ronald Riley]

The Inside Story

For those who do not know me I founded the Professional Inventors Alliance
http:www.PIAUSA.org in 1993, and in 1995 I became one of the key people
driving the creation of the Alliance for American Innovation whose goal was
to stop so called patent reform legislation and to create a voice for
independent inventor interests in Washington, DC. In 1995 I started an
organization to educate independent inventors www.InventorEd.org and
incorporated it as a 501(c)3 non-profit in 1998. My passion is innovation
and First Amendment issues.

As background information it is important to mention that this is the same
Taubman who was convicted in the Sotheby's art auction house scandal.

These is a bit more to this case. I was contacted by a journalist about
Hank Mishkoff because of the role I played in defending Mrs. Tibbets as
detailed on http:www.Skippy-SCAM.org. At this point Mr. Hank Mishkoff was
defending himself and not fairing too well. Taubman had prevailed in
getting an order shutting down the fan web site and Mr. Mishkoff had put up
a sucks web site in response.

The first thing I did was contact Mr. Krass at GIFFORD, KRASS, GROH,
SPRINKLE, ANDERSON & CITKOWSKI of Birmingham, Michigan because I knew him as
a result of his relationship with a personal friend and inventor named Mike
Levine. I suggested to Mr. Krass that suing a fan was very poor judgment
and that they should end this case. He did not respond well, and shortly
after the contact an order was issued shutting down Mr. Mishkof's sucks web
site about Mr. Taubman.

I was outraged by the court's attack on the First Amendment and responded by
creating http:www.Taubman-SUCKS.com, contacting Mr. Mishkoff and suggesting
that he contact Paul Levy with the Public Citizen Litigation Group. Paul
Levy had helped deal with threats of litigation by Edward B. Friedman
http:www.InventorEd.org/caution/friedman/ (Invention Submission
Corporation's attorney http:www.InventorEd.org/caution/isc). I then called
and wrote Paul Levy about the Mishkoff case, pleading that he should step
into the case.

Paul Levy took the case, and he kicked the crap out of Taubman. I have
little doubt that if Paul Levy had not stepped into the case that the
outcome would have been much different.

Ronald J. Riley, Exec. Dir.
1323 West Cook Road.
Grand Blanc, MI 48439
www.InventorEd.org
Direct (810) 597-0195, Off (810) 936-4356

Also President www.PIAUSA.org

And former advisory board president of the Alliance for American Innovation
1995-2002.

[Eric E]

Thanks for the note. That reminds me that I forgot to add Paul Levy's name to my posting. I left a space for it, but then got distracted. I'll fix that.

Your comment is identical to the comment you posted on another site:
http://falsepositives.blogspot.com/2005/03/howto-defend-yourself-against-domain.html

Hopefully, you're not cutting and pasting the same comment in dozens of blogs?

[Hank Mishkoff]

I just stumbled onto a great story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/9/prweb287873.htm

For all I know, you may have written about it already, but...

The article is about the Fashion Institute of Technology, which markets clothing under its "FIT" trademark. In keeping with the trend of generally overaggressive trademark lawyering, they've been going around suing everyone marketing clothes under any name that includes the word "fit."

Now, one of their victims is fighting off the attack by suggesting that F.I.T. should never have been granted a trademark on FIT in the first place, pointing out that the word "fit" has a long history (particularly in relation to garments). And now the defendant is going on the offensive: He's countersuing F.I.T. in an attempt to invalidate their trademark.

If he succeeds, he will not only show companies that they may waste hundreds of thousands of dollars if they let their IP attorneys run wild, the companies may end up losing the very intellectual property they're paying their IP lawyers to defend!