From Slate:
Last April, startup real estate news site BlockShopper ran the headline “New Jones Day Lawyer Spends $760K on Sheffield” with a link to the bio for the lawyer in question—Jacob Tiedt—from the Web site of his law firm, Jones Day. In July, it ran a similar item about a home purchase by Dan Malone Jr., another Jones Day lawyer, with the link to his Jones Day bio.
BlockShopper was following standard operating procedure by linking to publicly available Web sites. But Jones Day got mad. The law firm (a big one, at 2,300 lawyers) has never publicly said why it sued; maybe the powers that be there thought the posts compromised their lawyers’ privacy. Housing records are public documents, but the Web turns public into accessible, and the firm presumably wasn’t thrilled about having its attorneys’ home purchases broadcast. Jones Day demanded that BlockShopper remove the items. When BlockShopper refused, the firm sued the 15-staff startup for trademark infringement. Jones Day’s legal theory was that BlockShopper’s link would trick readers into thinking that Jones Day was affiliated with the real estate site.