Riley Reply to Skippy Letter Fax
| VIA FACSIMILE AND U.S. MAIL
Ronald
J. Riley September 19, 1999 Joan Crosby Tibbetts
Subject, Your letter. Re: CPC International, Inc. (Bestfoods) v. Skippy, Inc. and Joan Crosby Tibbetts Dear Mrs. Tibbetts: If you recall I contacted you after taking an interest in the Skippy, Inc. V. CPC/Bestfoods case. I had sent a press release to numerous journalists and journalism forums alerting them about the case. I received a number of emails and phone calls that www.Skippy.com was not accessible. I tried to call you but you were unavailable so I mirrored your web site at www.rjriley.com/skippy to allow journalists to see the site. One of the journalists who had to use the mirror was Russell Mokhiber who subsequently wrote two articles about the case. He and other journalists used the mirrored web site to gather information because they could not access Skippy.com.
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By the next day I had identified the problem with your web site. The DNS registration of your domain did not propagate to all the servers and that meant that only people who were on a server which had received the information could look at your site. I informed your service provider of the problem, and since Network Solutions is notoriously slow in dealing with such problems, I left the mirrored material on my site. Since you did not object to my mirroring the material at that time I interpreted that to imply that I had permission to continue mirroring the site. The first amendment issues in your case are far more important that either of us are personally, and a pattern of conduct by the judge and CPC/Bestfoods caused me to register www.Skippy-SCAM.org. I carefully picked the name of the site to ensure that it could not be confused with either your or CPC/Bestfoods trademark. I understand the necessity of your withdrawing permission due to paragraph 4 of the Order of September 9, 1999 by Senior U.S. District Judge Richard L. Williams. I have spent all weekend complying with your court ordered demand to delete the material from my website. I have made a good faith effort to remove all material which may be subject to the order. I have invested considerable time to replace the material with the relevant public documents in regards to the Skippy Inc.- CPC/Bestfoods dispute. Such public documents, and my original writings, should be all that remain on the web site. If I have inadvertently failed to remove any material which is subject to your copyright, please feel free to inform me and I will promptly rectify any oversights. My heart goes out to you and your family, for this attempt by the court and CPC/Bestfoods to quell your and other parties first amendment rights is unconscionable. The implied threat of paragraph 5 of the order is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to abridge the first amendment. I am confident that your right to preserve for posterity the story of how CPC/Bestfoods acquired the rights to use of the Skippy trademark on food products will be upheld on appeal. There is a reason that our founding fathers placed such a high value on the first amendment and a free press. It was to shine a disinfecting light on abuse of power, regardless of whether that abuse is perpetrated by corporations, governmental, or judicial interests. Page 2 It is not unusual for those who become arrogant in their exercise of such power to become complacent. CPC/Bestfoods is no exception, in that they were kind enough to enter complete copies of the very material they hoped to censor as court documents. Both Exhibit B (first filing) and Exhibit A (second filing) do a good job of telling this story. And by forcing you to not let me use the Skippy® graphics they have actually helped me create a better web site. For now I have placed hypertext links from where those graphics were to the court document which contains the graphic. It is inevitable that many more people will now read the court documents as a direct result of the court ordering you to retract the rights to use those images. You may rest assured that I will continue to speak and write about the injustice of the current situation, and this blatant attempt to stop legitimate public dissemination of crucial information and discussion about this case.
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