FatWallet
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Cashback website Online coupons |
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| Founded | Rockton, Illinois, United States (1999) |
| Revenue | 12.3 million (2009) |
| Owner | Performance Marketing Brands |
| Website | www |
FatWallet is a comparison shopping website, centering on a set of forums that allows users to publish deals and rebate offers on products and services, with computer-related products and electronics most prominent in the listings. It is headquartered in Beloit, Wisconsin.
FatWallet features a "Coupons" section where users can find discounts from online retailers.
Before being acquired, FatWallet also featured its own "Cash Back" rebate shopping section, in which members received back a percentage of purchases made through referral links to partnered retailers. FatWallet has since ended the Cashback program and now directs its members to the program offered by Ebates.
FatWallet users can post the sale prices of major retailers, often before they are officially released in retailers' advertisements, which involved the site in a legal dispute in 2002 involving Black Friday advertisements. Several retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Staples, have served FatWallet with "take-down" notices pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, claiming that their sale prices were copyrighted and must be removed from the FatWallet site. In addition, Wal-Mart served FatWallet with a subpoena to reveal the identity of the users who had posted Wal-Mart's prices, but the demand was later dropped.
Although FatWallet initially complied with the take-down notices due to the fear of liability, within two weeks it reposted the prices and argued that the prices were facts rather than expression, and therefore not subject to copyright. FatWallet filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against three of the retailers, seeking damages for knowing assertion of invalid copyright claims and a declaratory judgment that the take-down provisions of the DMCA were unconstitutional. The case, FatWallet, Inc. v. Best Buy Enterprise Services, Inc., was dismissed. The court ruled that FatWallet lacked standing to sue for any harm done to its users for having their postings temporarily removed, and FatWallet did not assert any injury to itself that the court found cognizable.
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Wikipedia