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MassMutual Sues to Shut-Down Policy Owners Associa
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posted by md
on Wednesday July 10, @06:53AM
from the dept.
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Dr. James V. Baker writes "Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company ("MassMutual") has filed a lawsuit against the MassMutual Owners Association, Inc. to force it to transfer ownership of its domain name to the company. It has also asked for unspecified monetary damages. The suit was filed on June 25, 2002 in United States District Court, Southern District, New York.
The policy owners' association is a worldwide, all volunteer, non profit organization with thousands of members, all of whom are policy owners of MassMutual, a mutual insurance company. The association is incorporated in Florida and registered with the U.S. Treasury.
To our knowledge this is the first time in history that a mutual insurance company has sued its own policy owners - who are the true owners of the insurance company. See (N.Y. Sup. Ct.), aff'd, N.Y.S. 1150 (3rd Dep't 1906), which is frequently cited as the definitive statement on the ownership of a mutual insurance company.
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We encourage you to explore the our association's highly acclaimed website. We can be e-mailed at massmutualowners@yahoo.com.
The association has no money to defend itself, however, it intends to somehow try. Our membership views this as a heavy handed attack by a company insiders to escape scrutiny. Worse yet, we believe that this is a clearly improper use of corporate assets.
MassMutual is not regulated by the SEC or any other Federal agency. It also does not prepare financial statements on the basis of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Policy owners believe the company insiders want to continue flying underneath the radar screens of accountability.
MassMutual is subject only to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Insurance Laws which hold mutual insurance companies to a very low standard of corporate conduct. In fact, in its April 2002 election of directors, MassMutual did not allow those voting by proxy to vote for six candidates who were properly nominated by more than 2,000 policy owners.
Members could only vote "for" the candidates nominated by the incumbent board. One of those people nominate by the MassMutual board was the Chairman of the Republican National Committee (Marc Racicot). Interestingly, he did not have to worry about "pregnant chads" or any other chads because the voters were not given a choice. Thus, there were no chads. Of course he was elected.
Such an election would have been tossed out and the company punished by the SEC, which has no dominion over MassMutual.
A formal complaint was filed with the Massachusetts Insurance Department to invalidate this "rigged" election. The Insurance Department ruled that there was no law requiring MassMutual to hold a fair election. Unbelivable.
Please take a look at our site. It is hard to believe that in an age of Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Global Crossing, etc. MassMutual's insiders can get away with attacking its owners' freedoms of speech and oversight.
Massachusetts Mutual is a shameless example of what has gone wrong and why we each must do our utmost to protect our Internet freedoms."
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MassMutual Sues to Shut-Down Policy Owners Associa
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The Fine Print:
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Since they (the user group) are a noncommercial organization, shouldn't they have used a .org domain instead of .com?
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At this point, the .com, .net, and .org TLDs are different without a distinction, and I know of no court decisions which indicates that a selection of .com as opposed to .org is a factor in infringement or dilution.
And, like you said, the site is non-commercial. As such, neither infringement or dilution law would apply. I haven't been able to get through to the site, but there may be other considerations on this point.
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