Dr. Jeremy Cooperstock 436 Strathcona Ave. Westmount, QC H3Y 2X1 jcooperstock@gmail.com January 12, 2017 Administrator Federal Court of Canada Thomas D Arcy McGee Building 90 Sparks Street, 5th floor Ottawa ON K1A 0H9 Dear Sir or Madam: Re: United Airlines, Inc. v. Jeremy Cooperstock Federal Court File No.: T-2084-12 I am the Defendant in this file and request that this letter be brought to the attention of Mr. Justice Phelan, the Trial Judge for this proceeding. I am writing in response to the two letters from counsel for the Plaintiff, dated January 10, 2017. I. Plaintiff is seeking a remedy not pleaded in the Amended Statement of Claim Throughout the present action, the sole injunctive relief sought by Plaintiff, as pleaded in the Amended Statement of Claim, was: (g) an interim, interlocutory and permanent injunction restraining the Defendant from, either directly or indirectly, further infringing the Plaintiff s said copyrights and from further directing public attention to his wares, services and business in a confusing manner all as set out above, and, in particular, from using or displaying, on the internet or in any other way, the Plaintiff s Trade-marks; The use of the untied.com domain name was not raised in the pleadings. On the contrary, the Plaintiff maintained in its Amended Statement of Claim (bottom of P4, attached herewith as Annex A) and its Closing Submissions (para. 198, P65, attached herewith as Annex B): Plaintiff is not seeking to prevent the Defendant from operating a website where individuals can express their views about the Plaintiff and in Plaintiff s answers to written examination, dated February 6, 2014 (attached as Annex C): No decision was made by the Plaintiff or others on its behalf to work on shutting down the Untied.com website and as such, there is no process to describe.
January 12, 2017 Page 2 of 13 The injunction now sought by the Plaintiff to bar the Defendant from using the untied.com domain name for his criticism of United Airlines, which the Defendant has maintained since 1997, is a mischevious attempt of trial by ambush and denying the Defendant his right to due process. As the Defendant reiterated during his closing submissions, untied.com does not offer wares or services as understood by the Trade-Marks Act. Even if this Honourable Court were to find in favour of the Plaintiff, it does not entitle the Plaintiff to a remedy that was not pleaded and that the Plaintiff explicitly stated it would not be seeking. Therefore, the Court ought to ignore this latest request by the Plaintiff. II. Plaintiff s Exhibit P-54 The Plaintiff is seeking to induce the Court to commit a palpable and overriding error with respect to the facts. Far from speaking to the likelihood of confusion in Canada, Plaintiff s Exhibit P-54 represents a spurious selection of complaints from passengers not isolated to Canadians, and spanning only the time period of June 2012 to December 2014. That is, the exhibit ignores the contents of the approximately 23,000 complaints received by untied.com from October 1998 through May 2012, all of which were provided to the Plaintiff. In so doing, the exhibit attempts to mislead the Court into the erroneous impression that the occasional reference to a complaint ID assigned by untied.com was somehow correlated with the Defendant s parody of the United Airlines website. Although the Court denied the Defendant the opportunity to respond to the Plaintiff s tendentious and misleading portrayal of the evidence, as contained in Exhibit P-54, it bears notice that passenger complaints making reference to an untied.com-assigned complaint ID similarly appear sporadically in previous years, e.g., in December 1998, October 1999, December 1999, May 2000, July 2000, March 2001, May 2001, February 2002, March 2004, August 2004, December 2004, March 2005, September 2005, October 2005, December 2005, February 2006, April 2006, June 2006, September 2006, February 2007, March 2007, July 2007, December 2007, March 2008, etc. In other words, consistent with the analysis of non-redacted MileagePlus numbers conducted by Mr. Ron Hall, if there was any confusion as to the source of the complaint ID numbers, this has been the case, at an insignificant level, throughout the entire history of untied.com, i.e., starting long before the Defendant began parodying the Plaintiff s logos. Since the Defendant was denied the opportunity of making a reply, following cross-examination, and thereby, not allowed to rebut the Plaintiff s tendentious evidence, and since the Plaintiff misrepresented this evidence as constituting Complaints on UNTIED.COM from Canadian customers, it is respectfully submitted that the Court ought to exclude Plaintiff s Exhibit P-54 from consideration.
January 12, 2017 Page 3 of 13 III. Brief of Defendant s Exhibits Since the Plaintiff consented to electronic service of documents on February 6, 2013, and did not rescind this consent, the Defendant provided the Defendant s Book of Trial Exhibits to the Plaintiff in electronic format. The Plaintiff s purported inability to obtain clarity as to what the Defendant submitted to the Court is disingenuous. As the Defendant clearly stated in his letter of January 3, 2017, I am hereby attaching a PDF of the Defendant s Book of Trial Exhibits, containing the specific pages that were accepted into evidence during trial. A hardcopy of this book, with physical tabs, has also been sent to the Court by courier. The electronic (PDF) copy of the Defendant s Book of Trial Exhibits, provided both to the Court and to the Plaintiff, is digitally tabbed with bookmarks that allow for direct identification of the pages that belong to each exhibit. The Defendant hereby provides an undertaking to the Court that the documents contained in the Defendant s Book of Trial Exhibits, as provided by the Defendant, both in electronic and hardcopy format, are unaltered as to content. However, the Defendant s Book of Trial Exhibits corrects some of the erroneous index titles as appear in the version produced by the Plaintiff, and avoids the misprinting artifacts contained in the Plaintiff s version. For example: Exhibit D-4 should not contain watermark artifacts, as appear on pages 6 and 10 of the Plaintiff s version Exhibit D-6, which the Plaintiff erroneously described as United airlines website homepage, May 26, 1998, is actually the homepage of untied.com of that date Exhibit D-16 is not solely an email from Sibername.com, as appears in the Plaintiff s index, but in fact contains two emails, one from Sibername.com and a second from Namebay.com Exhibit D-18 should not contain three copies of the banner of the Internet Archive WayBack Machine, occluding some of the text on page 2 and completely obscuring the important text on page 3, as it does in the Plaintiff s version Exhibit D-24 should not contain large ink artifacts obscuring the text of the passenger complaint, as it does in the Plaintiff s version Sincerely yours, Dr. Jeremy Cooperstock Cc: Me Jay Zakaïb, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP Me Frédéric Lussier, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP encl.
Annex A
Annex B
Annex C
Court File No. T-2084-12 FEDERAL COURT BETWEEN: UNITED AIRLINES, INC. Plaintiff AND JEREMY COOPERSTOCK Defendant ANSWERS TO WRITTEN EXAMINATION I, Scott Wilson, of the City of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., affirm that the answers set out in Exhibit "A" to this affidavit to the questions dated January 8, 2015 submitted by the Defendant are true, to the best of my information, knowledge and belief. SWORN before me at the City of Chicago this_jl' day of -.r A N, 2015. / /t; /7 A Commissioner, etc. --- c-) -S-cott Wilson "OFFICIAL SEAL" KAREN M. BLAIN NOTARY PUBLIC, STATE OF ILLINOIS My Commission Expires May 11, 2017
Exhibit "A" 1. Describe the process of how the decision or decisions of the Plaintiff or others on its behalf to work on shutting down the Untied.com website was reached, including the timeline and names of those who were involved in the decision or decisions. Answer: No decision was made by the Plaintiff or others on its behalf to work on shutting down the Untied.com website and as such, there is no process to describe. 2. Produce all documents related to the decision or decisions of the Plaintiff or others on its behalf to work on shutting down the Untied.com website, including but not limited to internal memos, emails and other correspondence, minutes of meetings, and notes making reference to shutting down the Untied.com website. Answer: No decision was made by the Plaintiff or others on its behalf to work on shutting down the Untied.com website and as a result, there are no documents relating to such a decision. 3. Produce a complete trace of how the information reached Mr. Wittig that efforts were being contemplated and/or being made to work on shutting down the Untied.com website. Answer: No efforts were being contemplated and/or made to work on shutting down the Untied.com website. The e-mail of Mr. Wittig is merely an example of voice messages received by the Plaintiff, Jeff Wittig, as a result of the Defendant having posted, on its Untied.com website, Jeff Wittig's contact information. The e-mail exchange relates to the efforts of the Plaintiff to have the contact information of Mr. Wittig and Ms. Jessica Rossman removed from the Untied.com website. These efforts culminated m the commencement of a proceeding in Quebec Superior Court (No. 506-17-074743-124). 4. What action or actions were taken by the Plaintiff or others on its behalf in the effort to shut down the Untied.com website? Answer: As explained above, no decision was made by the Plaintiff to shut down the Untied.com website and as such no action or actions were taken by the Plaintiff or others on its behalf
to do so. 5. Produce all documents related to the discussions, deliberations, and efforts of the Plaintiff or others on its behalf to shut down the Untied.com website, including but not limited to internal memos, emails and other correspondence, minutes of meetings, and notes making reference to the efforts to shut down the Untied.com website. Answer: No decision was made by the Plaintiff to shut down the Untied.com website and no actions were taken to do so. As a result, there are no documents pertaining to discussions, deliberations and efforts of the Plaintiff or others on its behalf to shut down the Untied.com website.