Those who have been around for a while will remember the first cease
and desist letter that Fry's sent me. They're at it again.
It looks to me like they don't like my ranking in the search engines being so close to the top,
so they're talking dirty and trying to scare me into doing things which would cause my site to drop
lower in the list.
Specifically, they're claiming that I'm infringing on their trademarks by talking about Fry's
on the Internet. According to the cease and desist letter, they would like me to remove the
third level domain "frys" from "frys.sthomas.net", remove "frys" and "fry's electronics"
from my META tags, and remove all instances of "Fry's Electronics" from my HTML source.
If I were to do that, this would go from being a site about Fry's Electronics to being a site about
some unnamed electronics chain based in Northern California. I wonder if that's their true intention?
You see, there's this little thing called "fair use" that falls under the First Amendment to
the Constitution of the United States of America. For all the money they spend on lawyers, you'd think
they'd have heard of it. I believe, as any reasonable person would, that my use of their trademarks
falls under that doctrine.
All the relevant documents are linked below. You'll need either Adobe Acrobat or the free
Acrobat Reader
to view them. The list will grow as the case progresses, so check this page often for updates.
I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And
because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
