Everyone in the industry likes pointing out who is connect to who, and what companies people used to work for. It makes for some good trolling on Facebook, and often can be somewhat relevant. Well, it seems that connecting the dots and pointing out a FTC lawsuit in regards to a competitor can get you sued.
Broadspring, the parent company of HowLifeWorks and Content.Ad has sued Adblade, a content monetization site for defamation in Federal Court in the State of New York under Broadspring, Inc. v. Congoo, LLC d/b/a Adiant and Adblade, Ashraf Nashed , Rafael Cosentino and Does 1-10 (S.D.N.Y No. 13Civ.1866).
The lawsuit claims that an executive of Adblade connected the dots from Broadpsring to Mindset Interactive and New Motion, dba Atrinsic, a company that had been sued by the FTC.
After the lawsuit was launched, Broadspring issued a press release about the lawsuit, claiming that an executive of Adblade was using a fake identity in order to defame Broadspring. Not exactly terrible cool, but worthy of a lawsuit?
“It is quite unfortunate that we have had to take these steps,” Commented Jonathan Markiles, C.E.O. of Broadspring. “Our business philosophy is and has always been to compete honestly by demonstrating superior performance for publishers, and to compete based on our ability to meet the financial and advertising quality requirements of publishers. We were shocked by the contents of the defamatory review and we were forced to take legal action.”
Adblade responded that the accusations against Broadspring were correct, and that in their opinion, Mindset Interactive a company that they claim was connected to spyware, and FTC actions is the same company as Broadspring. In their own statement:
“According to Broadspring.com, Broadspring acquired Mindset Interactive, and Mindset Co Founder Vinay Jatwani, whose bio was recently removed from Broadspring.com, became CEO of Broadspring and remained CEO until 2012. An archived version of the Team page from the Broadspring website from 2012 lists Jatwani as “Vinay Jatwani – Founder, Head of Sales.” The archived page states that “Mr. Jatwani was previously the COO and co-founder of Mindset Interactive Inc.”
“We were shocked by Broadspring’s transparent attempt to hurt our company and executives through their press release. We feel that we have no choice but to respond with a more complete story,” said Ash Nashed, CEO of Congoo, Adblade’s owner. “By suing us for an obscure online post containing reviews of more than 10 other ad networks, Broadspring is seeking to injure Congoo while effectively encouraging people to read the very comments they object to. As the leader in Content-style marketing, we expect competition; however, we believe that the players in the marketplace should be held to certain ethical standards of business practice.”
This is a very, very strange lawsuit in my opinion and shows a whole new level of how companies are doing business and trying to protect their reputation. While there seems to be a connection to the company, and frankly Broadspring doesn’t seem to be denying it, we have to wonder why they are taking such an aggressive action. Just my opinion, but raises some questions – especially if this is the way that we need to go, suing people for pointing out public knowledge? Really?
Let’s also be honest here, I’m not sure these relevations matter. For example, there is a lot of information out there that Midaddle, a notorious spyware program eventually become, Interclick… which was sold in 2011 to Yahoo for $270 Million. Not sure people really care about this type of news, especially in regards to actions that happened years and years ago.
What’s your opinion of this silly stuff?
