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This rebuttal was submitted to us on July 17, 2007. We have not altered the contents. However, we have reformatted it in an attempt to make it more readable. Some people do not understand that paragraphs can be their friends and are considered good grammar. This "rebuttal" is without comment by us. We present the "rebuttal" in an effort to be fair to the "accused". The annotated "rebuttal" contains our comments and direct quotes challenging any allegations made by the party.

We believe that this article was posted and commented on without the full and completed story behind the vero closure that occurred on April 18, 2006. This article was written as if this act just occurred and is still pending, preventing Nancy Lam, aka Raincloud, ebay seller chiihideki (Nancy's ebay name at the time of the vero closure) as of May 21, 2007 ebay seller akinotsuyu, from listing her cat and bunny hats. We, AnimeHot, are a small, home based business run by a married couple who hand make all the items that you see for sale on our website and ebay. We are not a big business, nor are we lawyers or attorneys and we do not claim to know now or have known on April 18, 2006 all the ins and outs of copyright law. We do not deny that we used the vero program to shut down 6 of Nancy's auctions where she posted her website in the item location section (an ebay violation) and claimed the following statement "See my other auctions for more hats and other colors! Why pay upwards of $25-40 when you can get the exact same hat and quality for half the price? Get yours today!". This wording made it sound like Nancy was purchasing these hats from us, AnimeHot, and that chiihideki would be offering an AnimeHot hat, “the same exact hat and quality”, to the buyer “for half the price”, as if we were deliberately increasing the price to gouge the buyer. Back in April of 2006 we were awaiting a patent and we had filed the paperwork with the copyright office, but we had not received a reply as to our copyright or patent status. We thought that we were within our rights to use the vero program and that Nancy was deliberately misleading buyers to think that she was selling an AnimeHot hat. At the time we were the only other ebay seller who offered a 4 panel, flip brim, fold over ear cat and bunny style hat. Nancy replicated our design and went so far as to duplicate our photo style, 3 individual photos showing the front of the hat, the right side of the hat and the back of the hat, with a hat she constructed. It was based on the misleading wording in Nancy's auction, the hat's identical appearance and our limited understanding of the vero system that we reported her auctions. It was not until after chiihideki's auctions were closed, after Nancy filed a counter vero suit against us and after the quoted emails that we learned that vero did not verify the legitimacy of a vero closure request. Again, we are not lawyers or attorneys, all we knew about the vero program is what ebay had posted on their site which reads “eBay is committed to protecting the intellectual property rights of third parties and to providing its users with a safe place to trade. eBay created the Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) Program so that intellectual property owners could easily report listings that infringe their rights. It is in eBay's interest to ensure that infringing items are removed from the site, as they erode buyer and good seller trust…eBay cannot be an expert in your intellectual property rights in over 25,000 categories, and cannot verify that sellers have the right to sell the millions of items they post on eBay each day, we need your help in identifying listings which do not appear on their face to infringe your rights.” When we filled out the paperwork for the vero program it states: “I, the undersigned, state under penalty of perjury that I am the owner, or an agent authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of certain intellectual property rights (“IP Owner”) I have a good faith belief that the listings identified (by item number) in the addendum attached hereto, offer items or contain materials that are not authorized by the IP Owner, its agent, or the law, and therefore infringe the IP Owner's rights; and The information in the notice is accurate We are being called nitwits, morons, jerks and idiots for actions that took place over a year ago with the information that we had at the time. We had a “good faith belief” that we had the right to use vero and close auctions that we thought were infringing upon our rights. While you may look at our animal hats and see only a utilitarian hat, we see an art form with our signature design and brand that we established in the anime and cosplay community. We did not harm Nancy in any way. We have not prevented Nancy from selling her own design of cat and bunny hats in any way. We did not take Nancy to court, receive a court order or vero Nancy for any other items. After Nancy's counter vero suit we had until May 10, 2006 to submit paperwork to ebay showing that we had filed an action in federal court, which we did not obtain nor did we have the money to obtain. Nancy was informed by ebay that she could re-list her auctions as of May 10, 2006. Well, May 10, 2006 has long since passed and Nancy voluntarily changed her hat pattern to something very similar to ours and no longer claims that she is selling “the exact same hat and quality”. In fact, as of April 20, 2007 she stopped offering cat and bunny hats for sale on her website, www.raincloudworkshop.com and the hats she currently offers on ebay do not have animal ears at all and they are a different style completely. We can't help but wonder why Nancy Lam sent in her partial report to the Tabberone Hall of shame over a year after the issue was resolved? We also wonder why Tabberone.com has taken the time to report on such an old and concluded dispute. We have not used the vero program since this incident and we are not preventing anyone from selling their items on ebay or anywhere else on the internet. So here we are, labeled in the hall of shame, as idiot #1 and idiot #2 under our wedding photo, for something that happened over a year ago that has long since been resolved. We were trying to protect our design, our brand and our livelihood as artists. At the time we wanted Nancy to create her own design and make her own artistic rendition of a cat and bunny hat, not mislead buyers into thinking they were buying an AnimeHot hat for half the price. Knowing what we know now in regards to copyright and vero we could have delt with the situation differently, but we do not believe that we did anything wrong on April 18, 2006. Nancy does not have any strike against her ebay account from us and she has not been loosing money over the past year and three months due to this vero filing. The vero filing only prevented her from re-listing the 6 original auctions where she claimed "See my other auctions for more hats and other colors! Why pay upwards of $25-40 when you can get the exact same hat and quality for half the price? Get yours today!" We are a bit confused as to why we are being chastised like we are perpetual vero abusers.