“Jump The Shark” Lawsuit Website
For years, the website “JumpTheShark.com,” hosted a lively public discussion of various TV shows, including criticisms of when they “Jumped the Shark,” or remained in production beyond the point at which they reached mediocrity.
However this changed in 2006, when Jon Hein, owner of sold the website, its rights and contents to Gemstone Inc., owner of TV Guide… and in doing so, he sold out the site’s participants.
After purchasing the site, Gemstone kept the name, but erased the contents, and replaced them with a glib, TV tabloid/ celebrity gossip-style website full of glitzy photo-ops and cheesy “hip” writing about various TV programs, actors and plots. While the site pretends to follow in the footsteps of its namesake about whether a series “Jumped The Shark,” in reality it’s nothing more than an annoying promo for mediocre television shows and celebrities.
One can only speculate on Gemstone’s motives for doing this; however in addition to purchasing the notoriety of the website, it seems that they also wanted to censor its content, in order to keep the public from bad-mouthing various television programs, upon which TV Guide’s sales of
And so, Gemstone bought out the website—and in response, Jon Hein sold it out… for an alleged $5-10 million.
This type of “corporate censorship” is not only disgraceful: it’s also illegal. While Hein might have owned the site, and rights to the domain-name “JumpTheShark.com,” he did not own the submissions themselves.
On the contrary: under US Copyright law, these submissions were (and by law, still are) the sole property of their original people who wrote them; likewise, their original authors submitted them for the intent and purposes of public display only—not for the purposes of private gain of these parties, Hein and Gemstone.
Relevant Law
The
relevant federal law in this case is
Federal Civil Law:
(a) Initial Ownership. — Copyright in a
work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the
work. The authors of a joint work are coowners of
copyright in the work.
(c) Contributions to Collective Works. — Copyright in each separate contribution to a collective work is distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole, and vests initially in the author of the contribution. In the absence of an express transfer of the copyright or of any rights under it, the owner of copyright in the collective work is presumed to have acquired only the privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution as part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work, and any later collective work in the same series.
Clearly,
the submitters contributed to collective works retained ownership, since none
of them expressly transferred the copyright or any rights under it; therefore under
§201, Hein, as owner of copyright in the collective work, is presumed to have
acquired only the privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution as
part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work,
and any later collective work in the same series. The actual submissions
themselves, however, remain the property of the original authors
Federal Criminal Law:
§ 506. Criminal offenses, (a) Criminal
Infringement:
(1)
In general. — Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished
as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed —
(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
Hein and Gemstone Inc. clearly infringed on copyrights of the submitters for the purpose of commercial advantage (Gemstone) and private financial gain (Hein) respectively, therefore they would be subject to criminal prosecution.
According
to Wikipedia, Jon Hein
may have sold the site and its contents to Gemstone for as much as $5-10
million; likewise, Likewise, Gemstone probably did this for the prospect of
commercial gain in removing this copyrighted information from public view. Both
of these constituted criminal offenses. For this reason, we will be contacting
the
LEGAL ACTION
CLASS-ACTION LAWSUIT:
The purpose of this website, is to start a federal class-action lawsuit against Jon Hein and Gemstone Inc., for
1) Copyright infringement, and
2) Theft and "Conversion" (i.e. buying and selling without permission) of intellectual property.
I talked to an intellectual property lawyer, and he said that this suit is viable, if the authors can be reasonably identified. This should be easy enough, since the site asked for e-mail addresses with every submission; therefore these should be recorded by the site’s records. I gave my e-mail address on most submissions, and was given the follow up "Thanks for jumping the shark!" or whatever.
This means that it's possible to verify likely authorship of submissions by e-mail address, and therefore sue for the return of this and all other intellectual property held and converted by Hein and Gemstone.
While Hein had the right to delete the information, he did NOT have the right to sell it for deletion; and therefore, both he and Gemstone had the legal obligation to retain both the submissions, and the names/e-mail addresses of the authors who submitted it.
If, on the other hand, they deleted this information, then they can be sued for the above charges, including illegal destruction of intellectual-property evidence that they should have known they should keep.
OUR OBJECTIVES
Our objectives are to seek justice, against this underhanded act of corporate censorship, and violation of copyright laws—as well as this outright theft of intellectual property. Specifically, we demand:
1) the return and restoration of all of the original submissions and electronic information from the original JumpTheShark.com website;
2) monetary damages in the amounts of the profits realized and expected by both Hein and Gemstone
3) Punitive Damages, to be determined by the court; and
4) Criminal prosecution to the furthest extent of the law.
CALLING ALL
ATTORNEYS
We have not yet retained an attorney for this, and will gladly welcome any proposals for those registered to practice before a federal court of law.
If
you posted a submission to JumpTheShark.com before the site was changed, and
the submission was accepted and listed on the site, then we want to hear from
you.
Likewise if you are an interested attorney, then let us know!