A victory (of sorts) against i.p. overreaching
EFF has soundly drubbed Barney’s lawyers, achieving a favorable settlement.
I blogged about EFF’s suit against Barney’s harassing lawyers and their overreaching i.p. claims back in August. From my earlier post:
c|net news reports on a new suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to stop the Barney lawyers from sending more baseless, threatening letters to a parody website. From the story:
EFF and the Akin Gump law firm are representing Stuart Frankel, who maintains the “Source of All Evil†site with a rendering of a vaguely Satanic cartoon tyrannosaur. Frankel writes: “The Barney Creature is a voracious, bottomless pit. All who oppose it with ridicule must be destroyed.â€
Matthew Carlin, an associate at the New York firm of Gibney Anthony and Flaherty, sent at least four threatening e-mail messages to Frankel starting in February 2002. Each demands the removal of the Barney pages and threatens immediate legal action unless the pages are deleted.
EFF has its own web page devoted to the suit. If you want to see a copy of the complaint, you can get it there.
And now c|net reports that EFF has won:
Lawyers for the plush children’s icon have agreed to pay $5,000 to settle a federal lawsuit filed against them in August by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was defending an anti-Barney Web site called the “Source of All Evil.”
The settlement, announced on Tuesday, caps a five-year campaign by the New York firm of Gibney, Anthony and Flaherty to rid the Internet of unflattering images of its plump saurian client.
Read the whole thing. And the documents, including the settlement, are at EFF’s webpage on the case.
UPDATE: The L.A. Times has also covered the settlement.
[…] Speaking of ugly fights implicating extinct species, Joseph Scott Miller reports on his Fire of Genius blog — no, he’s not the only one, but he reports it real good — that the EFF lawsuit against Barney and, kind of, his lawyers has been settled. I feel a little bad about that, because I’m of counsel to the firm involved and, well, I wrote the original cease and desist letters and used to be in charge of the Barney campaign, if you must know. More than this, I cannot say. But I don’t feel that bad about it because what better than a singing dinosaur with a person inside it and a bunch of crack IP-enforcement lawyers seeking only to do his bidding could provide better filler for this post? Nothing, I tell you. Except that you can be pretty sure the EFF spun the hell out of this outcome –consider they got far less than they spent on lawyer time, a motion to dismiss was pending and they didn’t get an opinion making the world safe for jejune parody sites or even an injunction against land war in Europe. […]
Pingback by LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION » Blog Archive » Laugh a little! — December 5, 2006 @ 9:21 pm
[…] Speaking of ugly fights implicating extinct species, Joseph Scott Miller reports on his Fire of Genius blog — no, he’s not the only one, but he reports it real good — that the EFF lawsuit against Barney and, kind of, his lawyers has been settled. […]
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