Blue Jeans Cable -- maybe all the rest of us can learn something from this

Having been the recipient of my fair share of cease and desist letters, I can only admire Blue Jean Cable�s CEO Kurt Denke�s response to a cease and desist letter from Monster.

Denke is a former litigator, and his closing paragraph is pretty much the Way Things Should Be:

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.

I say this because my observation has been that Monster Cable typically operates in a hit-and run fashion. Your client threatens litigation, expecting the victim to panic and plead for mercy; and what follows is a quickie negotiation session that ends with payment and a licensing agreement. Your client then uses this collection of licensing agreements to convince others under similar threat to accede to its demands. Let me be clear about this: there are only two ways for you to get anything out of me. You will either need to (1) convince me that I have infringed, or (2) obtain a final judgment to that effect from a court of competent jurisdiction.

Pwned.

Link here.

I subscribe to exactly the same philosophy, and we�ve responded in the same fashion to the C&D�s we�ve received. If we�re wrong, we�ll fix it immediately. But if we feel we�re in the right, and that there are real business or customer issues at risk, we won�t propitiate and we�ll fight back hard.

What�s sad is when lawyers call the shots in a company. Nothing against lawyers (really, I even have one in my family), but they often don�t have the broad business sense to look at something from the bigger picture. They unnecessarily scare people in a company (especially those who aren�t experienced). And that results in sometimes mindblowingly terrible business decisions. And sometimes, taking a friendly and reasonable approach to a potential legal issue can win you serious props.

Alex Eckelberry
(hat tip)