Libel suit bites petswarehouse.com owner

Long Island Business News, Jun 27, 2003 by Ken Schachter

Litigious online pet shop owner Robert Novak is plotting a $100 million legal counter-strike after losing a defamation judgment, being stripped of a prime Internet address and declaring bankruptcy.

Novak, who has been pursuing a $15 million libel, defamation and trademark infringement suit against a group of plant hobbyists, said he plans to file a $100 million lawsuit against Tucows Inc., a Toronto-based company that oversees the petswarehouse.com domain name and transferred it to the Colbert County, Ala., sheriff's office.

The petswarehouse.com domain was wrested from Novak on May 26 to satisfy a $50,000 libel judgment won by Sheffield, Ala., attorney John Benn, who has assisted in the defense of the plant hobbyists.

"I'd like to be doing other things," said Benn. "But I'm totally convinced that someone has to stand up to him."

Novak, who said he was "railroaded" in the libel case, denied making the defamatory statements about Benn in a CompuServe forum and said, in any case, Alabama courts lack jurisdiction.

The domain name, petswarehouse.com, was scheduled to be auctioned in a sheriff's sale on June 9. But Travis Long, Colbert County chief deputy, said Circuit Court Judge Jackie Hatcher stayed the auction for 90 days pending communication on Novak's June 2 bankruptcy filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court Eastern District of New York.

Novak, who drafts many of his court filings despite having no legal degree, said he is shopping the case against Tucows to major law firms. He said the case parallels a similar one two years ago in which a judge ordered the former owner of the sex.com domain name to pay $65 million for using fraud to gain control of the site.

Tucows "accepted a faxed copy of the judgment against a domain name they had in their control," he said. "Within 15 minutes they shut me down."

He said Tucows should have retained the domain name "because the bankruptcy initiates an automatic stay."

Visitors to petswarehouse.com now are directed to a notice of the sheriff's sale. Novak's online business has resurfaced at pets- warehouse.com.

But Novak said pets-warehouse.com gets only 100 visitors a day versus 14,000 to 18,000 a day for petswarehouse.com. A spokesman for Internet researcher comScore Networks, however, said it recorded fewer than 50,000 unique visitors to the site in May.

Novak maintains his Internet operations at the bricks-and-mortar Pets Warehouse retail store at 1550 Sunrise Highway in Copiague, which, he said, is owned by two of his sons.

The nationwide legal tussle can be traced to May 15, 2001, when an underwater plant hobbyist complained about petswarehouse.com in an online news group. Others in the group chimed in and by May 31 Novak had filed suit.

That case, involving 11 individuals from around the country, and Active Window Productions Inc., the sponsor of the news group, is still wending its way through the District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Islip.

On May 17, 2002, Novak filed another federal lawsuit against a group of hobbyists claiming a smorgasbord of injuries, including emotional distress, civil conspiracy, harassment and libel. That case is pending.

On Sept. 23, 2002, Novak sued Google Inc., Overture Services, Kanoodle.com and other Internet search engines for $6 million. The lawsuit charges, among other things, that the search engines violate the Pets Warehouse trademark by positioning sponsored links prominently and linking to web sites that are not entitled to be connected to the Pets Warehouse trademark.