Playboy's Sex.com Article Sparks Lawsuit
» Internet
Leonard DuBoff’s lawsuit is one of the odder outcomes of the legal battle over Sex.com:
In the February 2006 issue of Playboy, [Michael] Gross, a New York-based writer, detailed what he called the “biggest theft in Internet history”: the heist of Sex.com from the domain’s owner, Gary Kremen, by a convicted felon named Stephen Cohen.
On the sixth page of an eight-page story, Gross noted that by 1999, Cohen was making $750,000 a month off the online porn site, “so much that Cohen was able to hire one of the best-known trademark attorneys in the country, Leonard DuBoff, a disgraced academic with a shady past.”
DuBoff promptly demanded a retraction, then sued Gross and Playboy in March for $2 million, claiming his reputation had been damaged and that he had suffered “humiliation, embarrassment, and mental anguish.”
DuBoff, defamation and Sex.com
