Cease and desist letter to Daniel A. Burgess for trademark infringement of YourBrainOnPorn (September, 2020)

Introduction

Prior to February, 2018 I had never heard of Daniel Burgess LMFT. Suddenly, out of nowhere Mr. Burgess (@BurgessTherapy) employed multiple social media platforms to attack me and YBOP. Burgess’s targeted harassment and defamation occurred on Twitter (under several @YourBrainOnPorn tweets) and Facebook (the YBOP Facebook page, one of Burgess’s Facebook pages, and the Marriage and Family Therapists Facebook page).

During his February/March, 2018 social media campaign, Daniel Burgess defamed and harassed me – regurgitating Nicole Prause’s usual set of lies and fabrications of victim-hood, which she has spewed for several years. Burgess’s comments and tweets were nearly identical to Prause’s litany of invented misdeeds, leaving no doubt that Burgess and Prause collaborate and are in close communication. For more see: Addressing Unsupported Claims and Personal Attacks by Daniel Burgess (March, 2018).

In April, 2019, a blatant trademark infringement campaign was launched targeting YourBrainOnPorn.com. A new website with the URL realyourbrainonporn.com appeared, just a few days after its predecessor website ScienceOfArousal.com had appeared. The new imposter site attempted to trick the visitor, with the center of each page declaring “Welcome to the REAL Your Brain On Porn,” as the tab falsely proclaimed “Your Brain On Porn.” To promote their new site, while maliciously disparaging me and the legitimate YourBrainOnPorn, the creators of the imposter site created a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BrainOnPorn), YouTube channel, Facebook page, and published a press release.

As the owner of the new trademark-infringing site was unknown, on May 1, 2019 the attorneys for me, the common-law owner of the trademarks “Your Brain On Porn” and “YourBrainOnPorn.com” (this website), sent a cease and desist letter to most of those who appeared to be behind the infringing site: the so-called “Experts” (Nicole Prause, Marty Klein, Lynn Comella, David J. Ley, Emily F. Rothman, Samuel Perry, Taylor Kohut, William Fisher, Peter Finn, Janniko Georgiadis, Erick Janssen, Aleksandar Štulhofer, Joshua Grubbs, James Cantor, Michael Seto, Justin Lehmiller, Victoria Hartmann, Julia Velten, Roger Libby, Doug Braun-Harvey, David Hersh, Jennifer Valli, Charles Moser).

WIPO’s unbelievable, unsupportable decision

My attorneys filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as a possible route to having the trademark-infringing website www.realyourbrainonporn.com removed from the Web as swiftly and economically as possible. WIPO responded to the initial complaint that, in fact, Daniel Burgess was the site owner of record, so Burgess was added to the amended complaint.

While the WIPO arbitrator declined to support RealYBOP’s removal, he acknowledged that the infringing URL was indeed “confusingly similar” to my URL www.yourbrainonporn.com. He then decided that the infringing site was a “gripe” site, and as such, entitled to criticize my site.

My attorneys said it was not, in fact a “gripe site.” It did not criticize my site. In fact, it did not address the content of my site at all, and merely held itself out as the “real” version of my site in a confusing manner. However, the arbitrator, having opined that the infringing site was a “gripe site,” declined to examine the third element of my complaint: the evidence we supplied of Prause’s abundant bad faith. He stated that the evidence my attorneys provided “could well suffice to establish bad faith,” but found no need to reach a conclusion on that element in view of his “gripe site” finding (more here).

It goes without saying that Prause & Burgess’s attempt to steal my trademark, while mimicking the appearance of my website and Twitter account, revealed that they were the aggressors, the obsessed harassers.

Surprise. Communications revealed that Prause and Burgess’s legal counsel was Wayne B. Giampietro, who was one of the primary lawyers defending Backpage.com. Backpage was shut down by the federal government “for its willful facilitation of human trafficking and prostitution.” (See this USA Today article: 93-count indictment on sex trafficking charges revealed against Backpage founders.) The indictment charged Backpage owners, along with others, of conspiring to knowingly facilitate prostitution offenses through the website. Authorities contend that some of the trafficked people included teenage girls. For details on Giampietro’s involvement see – https://dockets.justia.com/docket/illinois/ilndce/1:2017cv05081/341956. In an odd turn of events, Backpage.com assets were seized by Arizona, with Wayne B. Giampietro LLC listed as forfeiting $100,000.

With legal actions at a stalemate, we decided to wait unto I finalized my possession of the USPTO trademarks (YBOP, yourbrainonporn, yourbrainonporn.com) before moving ahead to stop Burgess and company.

Prause has meanwhile weaponized the WIPO decision via a press release and constantly tweets a link to the WIPO page as if it exonerates her entirely from her trademark squatting. Her alias account’s bio (@BrainOnPorn) bragged about the WIPO decision, linking to it, absurdly claiming that I hate science so much that I filed a “lawsuit”:

Prause keeps referring to the administrative WIPO complaint as a lawsuit. It was not a lawsuit, but an administrative proceeding. Its purpose was to make a lawsuit unnecessary. She also claims we hate science. In reality, she and her cronies hate science, as my debunking of RealYBOP’s so-called “research page” reveals:  Porn Science Deniers Alliance (AKA: “RealYourBrainOnPorn.com” and “PornographyResearch.com”). It examines the trademark infringers’ “research page,” including its cherry-picked outlier studies, bias, egregious omissions, misrepresentation of the studies it does list, and outright deception.

Round Two FTW

Once my trademark ownership was finalized, my attorneys wrote Burgess on September 2, 2020. PDF of C&D letter:

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On September 4th, 2020 the trademark-infringing URL www.realyourbrainonpron.com disappeared. Most of its content, and all of its “experts” migrated back to the initial URL www.scienceofarousal.com.

Consider the following pages.

(Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)

Update (January, 2021): Gary Wilson now owns the RealYBOP URL. See press release – ATTENTION: YBOP acquires www.RealYourBrainOnPorn.com in trademark infringement settlement.