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Turning the Tables on the Accuser: MyWebGrocer vs. Adlife Marketing

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Matthew Chan:
Latest development on the Webgrocer vs. Adlife case. 

Attorney Gregory Howard of Donovan O'Connor & Dodig LLP (Bennington, VT) filed a motion to withdraw on behalf of himself, Kenyon D. Colli and Jack Pirozzolo of Sidley Austin (Boston, MA) in the WebGrocer case. The whole legal team is leaving.

The motion states that "Adlife no longer wishes to be represented by the above counsel. Adlife intends for substitute counsel to file an appearance with this court in short order".

The lawyers seems to have gone out of their way to step aside quickly and allow Adlife's new legal team to make their entrance.

On its face, the appearance is that Adlife Marketing (CEO Joel Albrizio) is firing his legal team. But part of me wonders if the legal team wanted to get out of the case and simply a bullet in the motion's narrative with this face-saving motion.

Either way, the motion was written elegantly and appears to be a professional exit by the outgoing lawyers.

It will be interesting to see who and what law firm(s) replaces these three lawyers.

Recently, Mathew Higbee & Associates (based in California) took on Adlife's copyright collection business. Will they make an entrance as "pro hac vice" (out of state) lawyers and take the lead?  Or will it be someone else?  And what Vermont lawyer is willing to step up to be local counsel?

Should be very interesting.

Matthew Chan:
In the interest of fairness, I have gone back to the review the docket more carefully.

https://ia801509.us.archive.org/19/items/gov.uscourts.vtd.27347/gov.uscourts.vtd.27347.docket.html

Although MyWebGrocer initially went on the offense, Adlife Marketing is punching back by filing their own counter-claim against MyWebGrocer.  Essentially, if Adlife Marketing ever had the intention of filing a lawsuit against MyWebGrocer, they saved themselves the $400 filing fee.

MyWebGrocer appears to be claiming that they got their licenses through a combination of the acquisition of Nexpansion in 2003 as well as their own recent purchases from an image agency. There were five images in this dispute but it seems by the counter-claim it has narrowed down somewhat to three images where Adlife is saying they can find no license agreement of the three images for either MyWebGrocer or Nexpansion.

Adlife states that it isn't even possible for MyWebGrocer to license a "pork rib" photo because it was never made available to anyone to license and resell.

This case is going to get messy because most companies (even if they source all images properly on the up and up) are not likely to have every shred of email receipt and document to prove they properly paid for it. This is further complicated by the fact that Adlife made their images available then terminated the relationship.

As Robert of Copyright-Trolls.com previously reported, even people who legitimately bought their images from iStock (part of Getty Images) have to fight pretty hard and rely on iStock's goodwill help to retrieve records of their previous Adlife image purchases.

We crack on Getty Images all the time for what they do but even I would be forced to admit everything I have heard from people caught up in the Adlife / iStock mess, iStock seems to have generated a great deal of goodwill in their effort to help their customers against Adlife accusations of copyright infringement.

Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi):
What I find most interesting in this case, is that in the original demand letters, Adlife ? Joel Albrizio basically threatens to sue the clients of MyWebGrocer, if they don't pay...Sure sounds like blackmail / extortion to me.. much like Joel Albrizio holds the voices of jupiter florida blog over my head.." take down copyright-trolls.com and we'll remove VOJF.. A distinct pattern in my eyes.

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