Weekends are time to have a little fun, even for lawyers, and in lieu of the great fictional lawyers I usually present here, I want to talk, instead, about weird (?) lawsuits -- the question mark being there because these are suits that seem, at first glance, to be weird or dumb, but which maybe have a grain-of-reason-to-exist in them.
Like the suit of McGinn v. Match.com. I'm not sure if that's the legal caption for the suit filed by a Brooklyn man in June, 2009, alleging that Match.com is liable for posting profiles of people who are no longer members of the site.
McGinn's claims start off promising -- saying that Match is deceptive by posting fake profiles like that -- but veers off into the deep end when he claims:
"Match's policy causes severe emotional distress and anxiety for some [subscribers], including those who keep writing e-mails to one member after another and never hear back because he/she is writing to people who've canceled."
That type of allegation may be why McGinn actually dropped his suit -- although he says it was to avoid ridicule and mocking on the web.
He wasn't too far off-base at the start, though: In Wisconsin, at least, section 100.18 of the statutes would likely apply to practices like posting phony profiles on the site -- so someone who signed up in hopes of meeting a fake "member" might be able to sue to get their money back, if not emotional distress. (They might have to sue in Texas, though -- Match.com claims that it's membership rules require it to be sued there.)
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