3 ms·

dear grellas: you are now the de facto news.yc lawyer. i am continually impressed with your clear, level-headed explanations of legal things which laymen just g

dear grellas: you are now the de facto news.yc lawyer. i am continually impressed with your clear, level-headed explanations of legal things which laymen just guess at, poorly. so i am a little surprised that you've added the word 'humorless' to the title, which doesn't exist in the original. editorializing in titles is frowned on here. how about instead putting your own reactions into a comment here under the article. i'm sure it will be great and i'll read all of it, regardless of the length.

grellas 17y ago
Frail is the human condition and each of us, no matter what our other strengths, is prone to succumb to temptation. I confess, the editorializing was done with mens rea in order to help capture the flavor of the dispute. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea magna culpa. On a more serious note, this case does highlight the tremendous dilemma faced by companies that invest large marketing dollars in a distinctive mark and brand only to see it suddenly subjected to ridicule in the public's mind. The real risk for North Face is not so much the direct competitive threat as it is the risk that future customers will no longer be able think of "north face" without immediately associating it with "south butt." Parody is a highly compelling way of grabbing our imagination and, if this type of association sticks, it will very likely do great damage to the mark. At the same time, when a company files suit over the issue, this clearly exacerbates the risk highlighted above. Lawsuits are no longer a localized matter. When they are filed today, they clearly carry the risk of garnering a lot of publicity if their subject matter is otherwise such as to grab people's fancy, and this one certainly does by dint of its subject matter alone. This must have been a tough one for North Face, and they probably had no choice but to sue to deal with it, in spite of the risks of enhancing the potentially bad association of its mark with the parody. It is a classic case of "no-win" for them. On a final, unrelated note, law (whatever its notoriously humorless aspects) does serve as a gathering place for all the foibles of the human condition and whatever humor may derive from it lies largely in the subject matter of the disputes over which people choose to fight. I remember once, while clerking for the federal court, a notorious lawsuit that stretched for years over a guy who claimed that an airline owed him millions because it allegedly lost his rare dime in transit. Along such lines, the "south butt" case is one for the case books.

grellas 17y ago

Frail is the human condition and each of us, no matter what our other strengths, is prone to succumb to temptation. I confess, the editorializing was done with mens rea in order to help capture the flavor of the dispute. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea magna culpa. On a more serious note, this case does highlight the tremendous dilemma faced by companies that invest large marketing dollars in a distinctive mark and brand only to see it suddenly subjected to ridicule in the public's mind. The real risk for North Face is not so much the direct competitive threat as it is the risk that future customers will no longer be able think of "north face" without immediately associating it with "south butt." Parody is a highly compelling way of grabbing our imagination and, if this type of association sticks, it will very likely do great damage to the mark. At the same time, when a company files suit over the issue, this clearly exacerbates the risk highlighted above. Lawsuits are no longer a localized matter. When they are filed today, they clearly carry the risk of garnering a lot of publicity if their subject matter is otherwise such as to grab people's fancy, and this one certainly does by dint of its subject matter alone. This must have been a tough one for North Face, and they probably had no choice but to sue to deal with it, in spite of the risks of enhancing the potentially bad association of its mark with the parody. It is a classic case of "no-win" for them. On a final, unrelated note, law (whatever its notoriously humorless aspects) does serve as a gathering place for all the foibles of the human condition and whatever humor may derive from it lies largely in the subject matter of the disputes over which people choose to fight. I remember once, while clerking for the federal court, a notorious lawsuit that stretched for years over a guy who claimed that an airline owed him millions because it allegedly lost his rare dime in transit. Along such lines, the "south butt" case is one for the case books.