A federal judge dismissed a trademark infringement suit with prejudice after the plaintiff’s owner perjured himself by claiming that he single-handedly wrote 100 pieces of copy that were at the center of the dispute.
In a March 27 opinion, U.S. District Judge Georgia N. Alexakis of the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the suit as a sanction after the owner of a content design company, Matthew Dunn, lied under oath by claiming he wrote the copy to text at issue. Say It Visually Inc., doing business as Fast Forward Stories, filed suit against Real Estate Education Co., doing business as Real Estate Academy, Migdal Law and Allan T. Midgal, claiming the defendants used its real-estate explainer videos without authorization, infringing its copyrights and violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. However, the defendants sought sanctions after discovering that Dunn’s texts were copied word-for-word or with minor differences from other sources, like Coldwell Banker, Realtor.com and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.