Penn Warranty Corp. v. DeGiovanni [1]

Penn Warranty contracts with individuals to provide service warranties on used cars. On May 20, 2000, Penn Warranty provided DeGiovanni a "standard warranty" for a used truck in New Jersey, where he lived at the time. DeGiovanni filed a claim under the service contract, which Penn Warranty denied. Giovanni brought a breach of contract lawsuit in small claims court in New Jersey, and the case settled out of court for $2500. He then created a "gripe site," on which he claimed that Penn Warranty engaged in deceptive business practices. The site contained some generally negative comments about the car service warranty industry, the auto insurance industry, and New Jersey judges. More importantly, the gripe site also contained statements that Penn Warranty "cleverly" interprets its standard contracts, that it is a "blatantly dishonest company," that it is a "crooked company," that it "has been ripping of ripping off its contract holders for quite a while," and that it had committed fraud.

Before publishing the site on the web, DeGiovanni contacted Penn Warranty and stated that he would publish the website and expose the company's unfair practices unless it "did the right thing." Penn Warranty did not concede to DeGiovanni's "demands," and he pubished the site. DeGiovanni also sent the content of the site to Penn Warranty's employees.

Penn Warranty sued in New York state court, alleging defamation, trade libel, harrasment, extortion and coercion, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, cybersquatting, and violations of RICO. On DeGiovanni's motion for summary judgment, the court dismissed the defamation and trade libel claims, holding that the statements on DeGiovanni's website were statements of personal opinion protected by the First Amendment. The court dismissed the intentional interference with economic advantage claim because Penn Warranty offered no evidence of any customer that did not do business with it as a result of DeGiovanni's site. The court dismissed the extortion/harassment/coercion claim, holding that the defendant could not be held liable for threatening to do something he had a right to do -- to express his constitutionally protected opinions. It dismissed Penn Warranty's trademark claim, which revolved around DeGiovanni's use of a domain name similar to the domain name of Penn Warranty's website, because DeGiovanni's use of the mark was not commercial and because the domain names were not confusingly similar. Finally, it dismissed the RICO claims for failure to provide any evidence of an enterprise, among other grounds. See Penn Warranty Corp. v. DiGiovanni [2], 810 N.Y.S.2d 807 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2005).