Slashdot Mirror
AmEx vs. rec.humor.funny
An anonymous reader writes "I worried that Brad Templeton's humorous reply in rec.humour.funny to the MasterCard threat might put an end to my daily read. I never heard the outcome, but since the column continues and he is using the same response to a suit from American Express, it must have been OK. This guy has more b*lls than I."
What Brad needs, instead of writing sarcastic responses himself, is to get a lawyer to write a letter pointing out to these pinheads that satire is constitutionally protected, and if they don't want to make asses of themselves and get laughed out of court like Fox News did against Al Franken, they should shut the fuck up.
Preferably in those exact words.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
This guy has more b*lls than I.
What, can people not say balls now? If not, could someone please say why?
Oh, maybe he means bills, as in dollaz. Meaning, he can afford the law suit?
Either way...
Billion dollar companies still struggling to overcome protections championed by a pornographer: priceless
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
Also you have to look at the other side of the coin. Can you imagine this country, in this day and age, if true satire/parody was not protected?
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
Your unauthorized use of AMERICAN EXPRESSWAY ... is likely to cause consumers to be confused, mistaken, or deceived as to the source of origin of your services.
...In addition, your continued use of these marks constitutes a deceptive business practice and unfair competition in violation of state law.
Considering that he's not running a business, claiming to run a business, or using these terms for advertising a business, these statements seem rather curious. Did they just use a search engine and automatically send out a nastigram based on the results? Would my writing "American expression, Membership has its Privileges" in this post result in Slashdot getting a letter? (If so, sorry guys)
"I think the point is he has not been sued yet, only threatened. There is no basis for a case."
The current climate leads people to assume the threats alone are sufficient cause to take action, and many people do, out of fear of the legal process itself.
This translates of course, to "might makes right" and it threatens to alter our society in fundamental ways.
No, you can't slander anyone with satire, because satire is defined specifically NOT to be slander.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Well, it wouldn't surprise me if a jury got hung up on the fact that he parodied *Columbine*, in a way that makes him seem sympathetic to the shooters...
This guy has more b*lls than I.
Either have the balls to use the word balls or pick a different word. Writing b*lls is just stupid. Allow me to demonstrate:
On slashdot I can say: I thought that anonymous coward was a fucktard.
Relaying the same information to my mother in an email I would say: I thought that anonymous coward was an idiot. Not I thought that anonymous coward was a f*cktard.
-Colin
Corporations have to protect their trademarks. It's easier to send C&D letters to everyone that might possibly be violating their trademark than to evaluate each one and decide if it's a parody. That way they have covered their asses in the event someone tries to invalidate their trademark based on that site. Unless you are not using their trademark to make money or publically associating it with something like killing baby seals, they don't care so long as they have sent you a C&D letter they can pull out at a future date and say, "No, we did something about that one."
Name one company that has lost their trademark in the past 30 years for not protecting it.
This is a baseless complaint, one that any ethical lawyer would not file. Are there any avenues to pursue with the state bar of the lawyers state?
2-digit years? STILL? Gah.
The worst is when people express a date like 01/04/03. Great; how the hell am I supposed to know which is which? I have to figure out whether you were from the U.S. and meant January 4, 2003, or from somewhere else and meant April 1st, 2003.
(If you don't think that this is a problem, consider that many restaurant kitchens employ large numbers of people from Spanish-speaking countries. Consider that food has expiration dates.)
I see many people still writing dates like this, too. I guess they saw "Y2k" as just some buzzword that the Morlocks were supposed to fix for them, and it didn't have anything to do with what they did personally.
Really, if you want a short date, you could at least use the 3-letter abbreviation for the month so that it was less confusing. Asking everyone to write ISO dates is probably too much, but dd/dd/dd is just evil. YY/mmm isn't all that much better, although if you're looking at it as a directory structure, it should be obvious that the directories would have to be in descending order. I mean, who would group things by the first day of the month, then the month?
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
>The various bullying C&D letters sent out are nothing more or less than willful bullying.
Corporate executives are often lawyers themselves, and if they caught their legal staff billing hours for unnecessary actions and destroying the company's public relations for no tangible or intangible benefit, it'd be open season on trussed-up corporate shysters for the ivory-tower clan.
Too many companies have been burned by this for it to be something they don't know will burn them.
So either they're plug stupid, or there's a purely CYA legal reason.
And that can go either way in a big corporation.
Protecting your trademark and policing it are two different things. You don't lose your trademark just by your name being common place. You don't have to actively attack people who use your name to protect it. Policing it means not allowing other companies to use it in the course of business.
Protect in this instance means - to maintain the status or integrity of
While police in this case means - detect and prosecute violations of rules and regulations
Do you understand the distinction?
A joke can never be construed as being used in commerce. You are not selling the joke. If the comedian took the joke and wrote it down and called it a "MasterCard joke" and sold it then it would be using it is commerce and even then it might not be infringement because MasterCard doesn't hold a trademark on jokes.
If MasterCard and AmEx have registered trademarks, they need to assert trademark infringement as much as they would need to assert copyright infringement related to the style and structure of the ads.
Now that seems to me like you said that they have to pursue copyright infringers in order to keep their copyright much like they have to with Trademarks. This is not true. A copyright never loses his copyright even if he never sues anybody.
This case has absolutely no weight and arguing about it is silly. You will never see this case even get close to court. It was a C&D letter to cover their ass in case of fallout of being associated with a joke told in bad taste.