Slashdot Mirror
Penny Arcade vs. American Greetings Revisited
Jojo writes "After American Greetings got some lawyers to bring down a Penny Arcade strip (M
i r r o r) last week, PA is now striking back.. IANAL, but I fear their latest strip might get them into real trouble this time." As always, PA cracks me up, but these are scary events. The banned strip is clearly a work of parody, which I believe is still legal in this country, unless that too changed recently.
Goddamn I wish there was a -1:Obvious mod.
It hurts when I pee.
Yes, but they weren't. The newspost that went alongside the comic didn't even MENTION the name Strawberry Shortcake. It was a rant about how useless McGee is.
Sorry guys, but PA is pretty obviously in the wrong here. You can't use third party IP for a parody like this.
Besides which, if someone wanted to make fun of gay porn by using the Gabe and Tycho characters as gay porn actors (in action!), do you think PA would sit around and do nothing about it?
This is the classic problem of trademarks in modern times -- you can't just "be nice" about them. If you start "being nice", you lose the ability to be "not nice" when someone does something you don't like.
The PA guys, as holders of some trademarked characters, should know this. The fact that they think they can get an exception because they're cool or something just speaks to thier idiocy.
Maybe because "Pizza the Hut" is not the the same as "Pizza Hut"??? Maybe also because Mel Brooks got the permission of Pepsi before making the movie? Unlike Penny Arcade, who think that they can just go ahead and make a comic with anything in it without worrying about copyright or trademark infringment, A big movie studio has lawyers who's job it is to clear these things up.
That, or she'd be happy that you're doing something vaguely meaningful in your life.
...now the "censored" folder on my desktop has nazi.gif in it. I didn't think that'd ever happen. It's just more ironic distribution, but if Penny Arcade is actually going to try and exploit their legal troubles to promote their lousy comics, I may engage in ironic deletion.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?