If they're smart, the fact that precisely nothing would make Seth's day more than being sued by a large corporation trying to stamp down on the little guy trying to expose their horrible business practices.
Seth can't get his new business venture onto the front page of the NYT by himself, after all -- he needs your legal department to make that happen. The rest of the Fortune 500 will promptly DDOS his order takers with their credit card numbers when that gets published. He'll also collect tens of thousands of links, many of them from authority sites such as TechCrunch, Slashdot, Consumerist, the newspapers which take direction from the NYT, etc etc, and as a result rank much better for other brands than he had previously.
If they're stupid, hopefully they're not so stupid that they'll ignore the lawyers who will say there is not even a scintilla of a case.
[Edit: Its not letting me respond because the site is worried I'm flaming you, which is totally not my intent.
In sum, litigation is a last-resort dispute resolution mechanism which you use to achieve business goals. Litigation here will not achieve business goals. On a totally separate level, which is academically interesting but only that, BigCo would be unlikely to prevail with a claim of trademark infringement.
There is no danger of confusion between Ford and Ford In Public -- it says "unofficial", prominently. There is no cognizable commercial damage -- Seth is not trying to sell cars. If you were a particularly bad trademark lawyer, you might argue that someone saying bad things about your brand causes you damage, but that cuts against a finding of trademark infringement, because it tends to demonstrate that the mark is being used, take your pick, transformatively, for identification ("nominative use"), and for purposes of commentary.
But, again, first rule of law for programmers: law is not program code, and litigation is not executing an algorithm. It is a negotiating tactic.]
Looking at the site I'd say they've definitely run it past a TM and Copyright lawyer. That site is slick as scumbags, IMO - disclaimers abound from the trademark disclaimer front-and-centre to the "we didn't aggragate this Google did" subtitles.
I bet he can find himself in a lot of trouble if he republishes something slanderous. He would be a co-defendant with the site that originally published it.
Imagine a scenario where somebody makes a slanderous comment on some silly little web page that not very people know or care about. If his page becomes very popular, the financial damages may be almost entirely due to the fact that people saw the comment on his page rather than the original.
Anyway, didn't we banter about another company pulling an asshole move like this a while back? They set it up so it looked like companies that didn't use their service were neglecting their customers?
Seth can't get his new business venture onto the front page of the NYT by himself, after all -- he needs your legal department to make that happen. The rest of the Fortune 500 will promptly DDOS his order takers with their credit card numbers when that gets published. He'll also collect tens of thousands of links, many of them from authority sites such as TechCrunch, Slashdot, Consumerist, the newspapers which take direction from the NYT, etc etc, and as a result rank much better for other brands than he had previously.
If they're stupid, hopefully they're not so stupid that they'll ignore the lawyers who will say there is not even a scintilla of a case.
[Edit: Its not letting me respond because the site is worried I'm flaming you, which is totally not my intent.
In sum, litigation is a last-resort dispute resolution mechanism which you use to achieve business goals. Litigation here will not achieve business goals. On a totally separate level, which is academically interesting but only that, BigCo would be unlikely to prevail with a claim of trademark infringement.
There is no danger of confusion between Ford and Ford In Public -- it says "unofficial", prominently. There is no cognizable commercial damage -- Seth is not trying to sell cars. If you were a particularly bad trademark lawyer, you might argue that someone saying bad things about your brand causes you damage, but that cuts against a finding of trademark infringement, because it tends to demonstrate that the mark is being used, take your pick, transformatively, for identification ("nominative use"), and for purposes of commentary.
But, again, first rule of law for programmers: law is not program code, and litigation is not executing an algorithm. It is a negotiating tactic.]