A few weeks ago, we wrote about the bizarre and troubling lawsuit filed by John Dozier against Ronald J. Riley. Riley, of course, is a well-known pro-patent system supporter who has generally made a nuisance of himself in the comments. Whenever he stops by here, it’s usually to personally insult me (and, in some cases, my family) and to spew what usually amounts to lies or totally unsubstantiated comments about the patent system. In other words, this is not someone I’m likely to defend. Yet, Dozier’s lawsuit is very troublesome. It basically highlights all sorts of questionable things that Riley has done to establish his “reputation” as a patent expert — but then the actual lawsuit is on trademark issues. The background on Riley, while amusing and interesting to us, has absolutely nothing to do with the lawsuit at hand. Dozier seems to merely be dragging Riley’s name through the mud. Why? Well, it appears that Riley insulted Dozier (similar to the way that Riley insults us) and even went so far as to put up some websites making fun of Dozier. Dozier, of course, isn’t known for taking criticism well, so apparently, he decided to go after Riley on very questionable trademark claims, while also dragging his name through the mud (which very well might be deserved — but if it’s got nothing to do with the lawsuit…)
Dozier’s still at it, with a blog post describing the latest details of what’s been happening, where he repeatedly references our original post (which slams Dozier’s lawsuit as being highly questionable). Dozier falsely suggests that Techdirt has somehow changed its opinion of his lawsuit. He says that a comment defending Riley on Techdirt was shown by commenters to likely have been Riley himself, but that’s not true. I know the IP addresses that Riley uses. And, I know who the person is who “defended” Riley and it is not Riley. It is another regular commenter who knows Riley and supports Riley (and trashes us all the time), but it’s not Riley himself. Dozier also suggests that Riley posted an article in a different forum pretending to be someone else, though there’s evidence that that’s not true either (edited to avoid confusion).
What’s much more troubling is Dozier’s claims that he’s been able to convince various webhosts to take down Riley’s websites. As much as we may find Riley to be an insulting pest, we would never suggest he doesn’t have the right to speak his mind. Dozier claims that any new webhost that hosts Riley’s websites will be accused of “aiding and abetting”, “conspiracy”, and “contributory trademark infringement” claims. Dozier must realize that such claims are a clear abuse of trademark law. The webhosts are quite clearly protected under section 230 of the CDA and are not responsible for the content hosted on those sites. Dozier, as a self-professed “internet law expert” should know this, suggesting that his claims to various webhosts are misleading. Once again, we’re probably the last people on earth to ever want to defend Ronald Riley — but Dozier’s campaign against him is equally as abusive as anything Riley has done.
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