Frivolous Corporate Threats

A blog that I often read, Lazy Man and Money, discussed a company called MonaVie, its Acai berry juice, and its marketing methods in an article called MonaVie Scam?.

MonaVie sent the Lazy Man a legal-sounding letter demanding that he remove all references to their name. They were especially interested in him removing it from the meta-data, which are like keywords to describe the page.

Lazy Man seems a little rattled by the letter, and why wouldn't he be? He's just a regular guy with a popular blog trying to make a living writing opinions and advice. Regular guys don't have a legal department, don't really know the law, and most important don't know how a lawsuit works. Regular guys instinctively forecast hundreds of dollars flying out of the bank account each hour to mount a defense against the "actions" threatened by the letter.

Lazy Man's original article is an unflattering opinion piece but not inflammatory. Many of the 3300 comments that follow it are worse than the story itself. Some of the comments, according to Lazy Man, come from a MonaVie IP address and call Lazy Man nasty names.

Lazy Man goes into a discussion about the points raised in the letter sent by MonaVie. I won't go into them as you can read his entry, but my own opinion is that MonaVie is complaining that Lazy Man puts the word "monavie" into the meta-tags and URL of the pages that refer to MonaVie. This is true, but I don't think it's wrong.

Everyone is allowed to refer to company and product names, otherwise how could we discuss them? It's protected in trademark law. Probably MonaVie mistakenly believes that by putting the terms into meta-data and urls that Lazy Man is somehow pretending to be MonaVie. The content of those pages makes it very obvious that he's not.

What should Lazy Man do now?

I think he should just write a letter back saying that he runs a news and opinion site and that the term MonaVie occurs only on those pages that the term is relevant. Lazy Man has started a rather large campaign against MonaVie. Not sure that this is the best way to go at it. These letters are probably more-or-less automatic on the part of MonaVie, and no real action has been taken yet apart from the letter.

The much worse part is that someone from MonaVie's computer network is making libelous comments. Here's what they said in a comment on Lazy Man's site:

Lazy man really is lazy. I can’t believe you even waste your time with this. Do you have a real job or do you just sit at home on the computer getting fatter and fatter. My guess…. the fat part. Why waste time bagging on any company that you haven’t trie. I haven’t tried this but if I had chance to, I am not going to listen to the fat, lazy, sit on computer with no lover Lazy man. You’re annoying douche

That is definitely against the law and Lazy Man should send out a letter to MonaVie demanding an apology on the Mona Vie website for that comment. I would be very interested in finding out what Mona Vie does about that letter. If I were Lazy Man and MonaVie did publish the apology or punished the worker that did it then I would post a very favorable article about how MonaVie handled the situation. Everything could be resolved happily.