Life Settlement Provider Coventry First Drops Twitter Trademark Infringement Suit

Life insurance settlement provider Coventry First has dropped a trademark infringement lawsuit it filed in federal court alleging anonymous defendants were posting false Twitter messages saying that it wants people to die quickly.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the suit listed "Does 1-10, inclusive," as defendants. After many anonymous attacks, including postings on Twitter, the company sued "to obtain the records from Twitter to ascertain who is behind these anonymous attacks," Alan Buerger, chief executive officer of Coventry First, told BestWire in June (BestWire, June 14, 2011).

Paul Levy, the attorney who represented the anonymous Twitter user, said Coventry First dropped the suit "when it learned what argument we were going to make in seeking sanctions against its lawyer and getting the case dismissed." The company "ignored the proper way to get into court," said Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen.

In an email, Buerger said Coventry First dropped the suit "because we achieved our objective."

In its suit, the life settlement provider said it's used the trademark, Coventry First, in connection with its life settlement products and services. The defendants, Coventry First alleged, have established and actively use the domain twitter.com/coventryfirst and this site's domain name incorporates its trademark.

Levy said he planned to argue that there was no trademark infringement and that the First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously "so long as the speech itself is not truly wrongful." Also, by starting discovery "without the court's permission, the plaintiff and its lawyers had violated the rules of procedure in federal court," he said.

Coventry First alleged the use of its trademark throughout the site and in connection with numerous "tweets" about the life-settlement industry "is likely to cause confusion in the marketplace as to the source, sponsorship and/or affiliation" of the site and the comments posted on it (BestWire, June 14, 2011).

One Tweet read: "sure, maybe health ins. companies want u to die fast once you get sick but they want u healthy for a long time first. Coventry wants u dead NOW!" and "the faster people die the more coventry first profits! Not even cig companies want their customers to die as fast" (BestWire, June 14, 2011).

Coventry First, one of the largest life settlement providers in the United States, buys life insurance policies from policyowners who no longer need their insurance and aggregates these policies for institutional investors around the world.

The firm alleged trademark infringement under the federal Lanham Act and violations of the federal Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, among others.

(By Fran Matso Lysiak, senior associate editor, BestWeek: [email protected])