Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition LLC filed a lawsuit last week in federal court against Email Appenders and four of its employees claiming they are falsely offering for sale a list of attendees to the Internet Retailer conference that took place in Chicago in June. The suit also alleges violation of the trademarks of Internet Retailer and its conference, widely known as IRCE.
“We’re suing them because we believe this is a scam,” says Jack Love, president of Vertical Web Media, which operates Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition LLC and publishes Internet Retailer magazine, the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, the IRNewsLink newsletters and other publications related to e-commerce.
Exhibits in the lawsuit include e-mails from employees of Email Appenders offering to sell companies that exhibited at the Internet Retailer conference a list of 5,000 event attendees. “We do not sell that list, we don’t rent that list, we don’t make it available to exhibitors,” Love says. “They don’t have the attendee list for IRCE, and if they do they got it illegally.”
Email Appenders first began offering the list shortly after the Internet Retailer show in June, leading Internet Retailer’s attorney to send Email Appenders a letter asking that it stop offering the list for sale. Email Appenders resumed efforts to sell the list in November. They asked either $2,500 or $3,500 for the list.
Love notes that the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition was recently cited by Trade Show Week magazine as the fastest-growing trade show in North America, which would make the authentic list of the more than 5,100 individuals who attended the show in June very valuable. Love says the suit is also intended to protect the registered trademarks Internet Retailer and IRCE, as the e-mails from Email Appenders could lead recipients to believe that the company was authorized to sell the attendee list by Internet Retailer or its parent company, Vertical Web Media LLC.
“To say they have what they purport to be the official list of IRCE attendees when they don’t is extremely misleading,” says Love. “We want to make sure to protect our trade names and to protect our clients who would be disappointed to get a list that they thought was the IRCE list when it’s not.”
Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vertical Web Media, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. The suit seeks an injunction preventing defendant Email Appenders from using the Internet Retailer and IRCE trade names or doing anything “to deceive purchasers into the belief that the Defendants’ goods and services are Internet Retailer’s goods and services or are approved or sponsored by Internet Retailer.” The suit also asks Email Appenders to account for any revenue from the sales of the purported IRCE list, which could lay the basis for a damage claim.
Email Appenders did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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