A Rose By Any Other Name, Plucked
Southern Voice, a 22-year old name in southern gay media, is embroiled in a garden of controversy (again) as its new owners allege former staffers of using the brand illegally to raise funds for a new newspaper and deceive advertising customers.
Today, Gaydar, Inc., the company that brashly bested a bid by those former employees of Southern Voice (SoVo) and David Magazine in bankruptcy court on February 25, 2010, to legally gain control of the glbt publications’ names and assets, served SoVo’s former editor and its original founder with a not-so-sweet-smelling Cease and Desist Notice from using its name.
Scott M. Herrmann, an Atlanta attorney who composed the six-page notice on behalf of Gaydar, Inc., confirms that Laura Douglas Brown, Editor of SoVo at the time it ceased publishing in November of 2009, and Chris Cash, the paper’s founder who sold out to Window Media a decade ago, received their copies of it early this afternoon. Window was the largest conglomerate of gay publications in the country when it went belly up last year under a defaulted $38 million Small Business Administration loan. Since then, the two women have formed The Georgia Voice (GA Voice) with other former SoVo employees and funds derived from a campaign called “Save SoVo.” Their new for-profit company did this by soliciting non-tax deductible donations from the public using the Southern Voice name via Facebook, MySpace, and most notably from a web site called SaveSoVo.com that currently brings web surfers directly to The Georgia Voice website. In Mr. Herrmann’s snarky prose, this is a big no no, and that money may now belong to Gaydar.
“Ms. Cash started the website ‘www.SaveSoVo.com’ on November 20, 2009, to raise money to save the publication from perishing, illegally using Southern Voice’s legally protected intellectual property. Ms. Brown then posted a letter on the website asking for donations, which eventually came from former employees of Southern Voice, people in the community, subjects of Southern Voice articles, and the Lloyd E. Russell Foundation, to name a few,” he asserts in the notice. “As you have been in the publishing industry for many years,” he addresses them, “I am sure that you know what you are doing is completely improper and illegal.”
Herrmann also refers to the incorporation of SoVo in the site’s name as “a violation of federal and state copyright law” and directs Brown and Cash to the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) of 1999, “making these acts illegal and entitling the proper owner to civil, criminal, and punitive damages.”
The “proper” owner, in this case, is an entity comprised of individuals with a list of reportedly improper dealings attached to their own resumes. Gaydar, Inc. is a relatively new company moniker formed by Nightlife Media’s Matt Neumann, publisher and editor of Gaydar magazine (replaced by David magazine last week) and Pearl Day’s Brian Sawyer. Both former companies have a weeded trail of debts that extends to this author in my capacity as Contributing and then Interim Editor of ATL Free Press (defunct since January) along with other employees and a couple of printers. Pearl Day, which includes Sawyer’s partner in that venture, Chip O’Kelley, also a current Gaydar employee, has been accused of shortchanging three reputable glbt charities $9,000 combined, which stingingly is the same amount of money for which they plucked SoVo and David in court.
In a humorous turnabout, the notice also alleges that over the past couple of days, GA Voice has been putting stacks of their debut print issue in Southern Voice distribution boxes located around Atlanta. ATL Free Press was accused of the same transgression this past winter. But the less comical augmentation this time around is the reported use of GA Voice stickers over the SoVo logo on the boxes, another major no no to which Herrmann exasperates, “I am amazed in wonderment that [Cash and Brown] have gone to this extreme step in corporate espionage in clearly usurping the name, identity, and property rights from my client.”
But the real spoils in this war of the roses are the advertisers, and Gaydar, Inc.’s Cease and Desist Notice cites Brown and Cash as misrepresenting themselves to many of them as “the ‘new’ Southern Voice,” and mentions that prominent gay businesses, including Amsterdam, Mixx, and Flora Dora, have confirmed this. Herrmann told Don’t Label It that sales representatives for Southern Voice have had to clarify to potential ad buyers that they have not already purchased ads in Southern Voice because of GA Voice’s “false representations.”
Herrmann closes by disclaiming that his “damage assessment is continuing” and promises Cash and Brown that he “will be in touch about the financial injuries [they] have caused.”