Ever see corporate lawyers circling their prey in their natural habitat?
Then feast your eyes CBC legal going after hockeyfightincanada.com for copyright violations, ordering a cease and desist and an immediate handover of the website under threat of legal action.
Partly at issue is the logo, and the Tea Makers Legal Team advises they may have something there.
The Legal Team also notes that the deadline stipulated in the letter has passed, and hockeyfightincanada.com is still selling t-shirts.
They advise the proprietor to wait it out and see how far CBC will push it, and how silly they are willing to make themselves look. This could be very far, and very silly.
But all he has to lose is a few t-shirts that weren’t selling so hot anyway.
Until now, that is.
12 Comments
This is unbelievable… in the letter from the lawyers it says something about the logos and the domain names could be confused for the real thing… gimmee a break, you’d have to have an I.Q. as low as a lawyer’s to mistake the two… oh but wait… there could be money it for the lawyers right… hmmmmm.
Here’s a novel approach, Justin:
Try having all those thoughts before writing.
Or, be like a few others, and write without thinking at all.
Oh…one more thought though…what about ‘Little Mosque on the Prarie’ … sounds familiar from somewhere. Hmmm..nope can’t think of it at the moment. It’ll come to me though, glad they’re not making TShirts.
Anonymous – You’re very welcome, glad to be of service.
… the smartest guys in the room
Thanks to all the legal experts here commenting. I’m sure you know much better than the CBC, which has been protecting the brand for years, as well as the copyright lawyers at Gowlings.
Justin’s right, in my opinion: there’s enough visual differences in the logo for it to stand on its own, and the parody defence also kicks in here. CBC fan that I am, their legal people should’ve known better.
The Scribd resource is great. Another wonder. Is there anything the internet can’t do?
No one can prevent someone else from uttering or printing the phrase Hockey Fight In Canada. It’s a common headline most of the year. CTV could use it.
But there’s an artistic rendition involved, even when in this case the artist is a corporation.
How much of one logo is derived from the other?
As the artist, would you feel ripped off?
Is it legitimate parody/satire and therefore protected?
How much do we need to alter an image before it becomes ours? without making it unrecognizable from the original.
If you wanted to do a National Lampoon of the Oprah or the Frank magazine or the New York Times you’d want them to look like the original right down to the font.
We took “all the news that fits’ and made it ‘all the fits that’s news’.
I could get behind the complaint if he was bootlegging copies of CBC merchandise, but not if the T-shirt reads “Frankie Say Relacks”.
How did Warhol get away with it?
Sadly this is one of those cases where – if the ‘Hockey Fight’ people had the money for a legal team, they would probably win. I mean even the logos look different enough to me that there would be no grounds for legal action. But, because the CBC has more money for Lawyers and Court fees, they will probably win.
The net result of this litigation is that the product will disappear from the market.
But it’s such a cool statement.
One would be led to suspect as much.
Isn’t there some kind of parody argument that’s going to be used to tell CBC to take a hike on this one? I remember when Starbucks Coffee went after comics artist Kieron Dwyer over his little parody logo stunt…
Wow, 18 pages of fun reading (Schedule A is a very interesting history of the trademark and logo.)
But “transfer the domain names”? (If they can’t have them, no one will. Might as well grab their lunch money too.)
And “destroy under oath all materials”? What is this, the Avro Arrow?