The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York on Wednesday, seeks to force Google to give Jews for Jesus control of the site as well as unspecified monetary damages.
“We have a right to our own name and Google has allowed the use of our name on Blogspot without our permission,” said Susan Perlman, associate executive director with Jews for Jesus.
“Our reputation is at stake,” Perlman told Reuters.
InsideGoogle’s take on this lawsuit isn’t very complimentary:
Considering that most any organization can afford a blog hosted on its own domain, this is an attempt to shut down a site critical of theirs and generate publicitiy, no more. Google can’t afford to give them the subdomain, because then they would have to turn over any Blogspot subdomain with any trademark in it, and I doubt any court would agree with the fringe “religion???.
The object of this lawsuit has three posts on it, the first in January 2005 and the last in May 2005. Its self-proclaimed purpose is as follows:
Jews for Jesus is the “name brand” in Fundamentalist missions to the Jews. They take pride in their confrontational style of evangelism, boasting that their mission is to “make the messiahship of jesus an unavoidable issue…” This blog is being established as a forum for those interested in exchanging both the positive and the negative aspects of the missions methodology, the state of relationship between the organization (or the church, etc) and the Jewish community at large, and the inner workings of the organization as compared to other missions/ministries/corporations in the United States and throughout the world. There are other sites that address these issues from one point of view or the other. This site is established for the purpose of meaningful exchange so that issues can be explored and to help people and pastors decide if Jewish missions should be supported, and if so, should this particular organization be considered.
It seems that this is really a question of freedom of expression and it will be interesting to see what the outcome is.
Technorati Tags: Courts, freedom of expression, Google, Yahoo!
RSS – Posts
What do you think?