Summary: BERTL, a company Digital Times has a contentious intellectual property relationship with, has been sued by the XEROX Corporation.
Xerox Sues BERTL for Defamation
Xerox Corp. filed a defamation suit against the Business Equipment Research & Test Laboratories [BERTL]. In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Rochester, N.Y. Xerox claims that in November it commissioned BERTL to conduct a series of tests comparing its Document Center office printer systems to competing systems by Canon and Ricoh. Xerox states that it paid $20,000 for the tests, including rights to use the reports, which gave favorable results to the Xerox products.
The suit alleges that BERTL then skewed the results in an e-mail it sent in July to Xerox customers and competitors, and suggested that Xerox did not have the right to use the results of the tests. “Whatever BERTL’s motive may have been, it tried to smear Xerox’s name and mislead our customers and competitors – a blatant act of defamation,” said Gil Hatch, president, Xerox Office Systems Group. “These test results were very favorable to Xerox – they showed the superior performance of our systems – and Xerox had the right to use those results.”
Carmel Rowley, CEO of BERTL, said she received faxes and e-mails from her customers asking about specific documents that were represented as coming from BERTL. These documents, according to Rowley, were Xerox documents that infringed the BERTL copyright.
“[I believe] this is evidence that Xerox has not done its homework properly,” said Rowley, referring to differences between the test result document Xerox said it created for internal use only and versions of that document apparently distributed outside Xerox. According to Rowley, the lawsuit is a “preemptive strike on Xerox’s part to create smoke and mirrors” in a copyright infringement case that BERTL has been building against Xerox since earlier this year.
-Source: September 2002, Digital Output Magazine