Arrington Responds To the JooJoo, Files Suit

itwbennett writes "Not normally 'one to enjoy a casual read of a lawsuit,' blogger Peter Smith admits to finding the suit Michael Arrington is filing against Fusion Garage over the JooJoo (nee CrunchPad) fascinating. 'Skip to page 4, starting with item 11,' says Smith. 'At this point I don't know what to think, Every time I get close to pretty much accepting Arrington's story at face value, he pulls something that makes me stop and reexamine his arguments.' For example, says Smith, in one bullet point in Arrington's latest salvo, he calls out the press, saying 'it is irresponsible for press to link to the pre-sale site.' 'This attempt to directly sway the press away from Fusion Garage really spikes my suspicion meter' says Smith. 'After all, Arrington is the press. If I started writing screeds advising him on what he should or should not say about a product, what would he think?'"

Re:Does Not Look Good for Arrington

[yincrash]

According to Arrington, a lot of the hardware IP is technically owned by Pegatron, to be exclusively licensed to Crunchpad. However, it seems that Fusion Garage has taken that IP to another ODM to get it manufactured which would be IP theft if that is the case.

Re:Does Not Look Good for Arrington

[Firehed]

Under trademark law? Probably nothing. But he'd have been grossly negligent to be this far along in the development cycle without some sort of contract in place between himself (or TC) and Fusion Garage (I've heard that there were mostly verbal agreements in place, which wouldn't hold up in court, but Arrington is/was a lawyer and should know better). Presumably, something happened that would have been in breach of that contract and would constitute a valid lawsuit.

Breach of partner fiduciary duty & copyright..

[waTR]

After a quick read through part of the document linked to, it sounds like this was a partnership as per the law (if you act and give the impression that you are partners, under the law, you are to those parties who you created the impression to). So there would be breach of fiduciary duty on Fusion Garage's part... This looks like a lawyer's wet dream in some respects... Though it will be interesting how the lawyers will play this...

Also...what is TC trying to get out of this? All they will likely get is an injunction (maybe interlocutory--thereby preventing sale of the Joojoo in the US before it even launches). There DOES seem to be some copyright involved (design of the tablet), as the copyright on the software is apparantly owned by Fusion Garage.

Interesting...

Re:So what did Arrington actually do?

[linhares]

If anyone subscribed to it in google reader or other feeds, it's probably still there. It will be nice to read what was in there. Arrington's chuck norris is in the US visas. If it was really techcrunch that got visas for that guy with a wig and his band, then either a) they conducted official business with techcrunch.com, or b) they Fking lied to Uncle Sam (which is not a good position to be in in an american court, i would imagine there may be some crimes involved way beyond the civil stuff).