Today’s New York Times has a delightful story about British t-shirt company Last Exit To Nowhere. Its shirts feature logos made famous by works of fiction.

A bit from the story:

Consider the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s part of the fictional universe depicted in the 1979 film “Alien” and its sequels; Nostromo, the spaceship freighter in the first movie, is a Weyland-Yutani vessel. The company doesn’t do much in the way of branding in, you know, reality. But as it turns out, it’s possible to buy yourself a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt, or even a Nostromo T. It also turns out many people have.

LastExitToNowhere.com specializes in designs relating to “some of the most memorable places, corporations and companies in 20th-century fiction.” Other popular T-shirts on the site, which went up in June, include one for Tyrell (“More Human Than Human” is its motto), maker of genetic replicants in “Blade Runner,” and Polymer Records, a music label in “This Is Spinal Tap.” The site’s founder is Mike Ford, a 34-year-old graphic designer and movie fan based in Nottingham, England. Thanks to attention from blogs and, more recently, publicity from the British magazine Empire, Ford says he has shipped about 4,000 shirts to customers in Europe, the U.S., even New Zealand, and imaginary brands are now his full-time job. (With shipping, the T’s cost around $45 for the U.S. shopper.)

Putting aside the intellectual property law questions (e.g., is the matter better analyzed as a trademark matter, or a copyright matter?), the story highlights the fun some experience in wearing their hearts on their chests (rather than their sleeves).

The author, Rob Walker, blogs at http://www.murketing.com/journal/.

Today’s NYT has the story on a dust-up between Rebecca Charles, owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar, and erstwhile Pearl sous-chef Ed McFarland’s Ed’s Lobster Bar.

A bit of the story …

In recent years, a handful of chefs and restaurateurs have invoked intellectual property concepts, including trademarks, patents and trade dress — the distinctive look and feel of a business — to defend their restaurants, their techniques and even their recipes, but most have stopped short of a courtroom. The Pearl Oyster Bar suit may be the most aggressive use of those concepts by the owner of a small restaurant. Some legal experts believe the number of cases will grow as chefs begin to think more like chief executives.

Lord help us. Isn’t the opportunity cost of such litigation awfully high, for a restaurant business where the owner’s attention to things like new recipes is key?

Of course, Mike Madison and Frank Pasquale offer sharp commentary.

UPDATE: And Tim Lee quotes Tom Lee.

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.”

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.

In today’s New York Times, a story appears about an online game called “Disaffected!“, created by Persuasive Games.

Persuasive Games is in, no surprise, the persuasion business:

With over 30 years of combined success in marketing, advertising, game research, and design, Persuasive Games is the natural choice of leading advocacy groups and lifestyle brands who want to communicate effectively through electronic games. Our games influence players to take action through gameplay. Games communicate differently than other media; they not only deliver messages, but also simulate experiences. While often thought to be just a leisure activity, games can also become rhetorical tools. [ from PG’s website ]

In the new game, PG takes a different tack about nonclient Kinko’s:

Disaffected! - a videogame parody of the Kinko’s copy store, a source of frustration from its patrons. Disaffected! puts the player in the role of employees forced to service customers under the particular incompetences common to a Kinko’s store. From a new series of persuasive games we call anti- advergames.

Disaffected! gives the player the chance to step into the demotivated position of real FedEx Kinko’s employees. Feel the indifference of these purple-shirted malcontents first-hand, and consider the possible reasons behind their malaise — is it mere incompetence? Managerial affliction? Unseen but serious labor issues? [ from PG’s website ]

The NYT story quotes Fordham law professor Sonia Katyal on the more general phenomenon she calls “semiotic disobedience” — “the reinvention or subversion of logos and other symbols of commercial persuasion as part of a battle to redefine their meaning in ways that are frankly oppositional.” More from the NYT:

Katyal’s paper makes clear that she is not calling for, say, the legalization of billboard alteration. Instead, she offers a different intellectual framework for thinking about such acts. Her point is to consider whether some antibrander tactics are not simply vandalism or trademark infringements but rather acts that break laws partly to question the assumption behind the laws themselves. “Acts of semiotic disobedience,” as she puts it, “actually try to disobey the meaning of the sign itself” and to redefine that meaning in the process.

The story also quotes PG exec Ian Bogost: “And Ian Bogost says that he believes Disaffected! is a legally protected parody.”

Seven years ago, in Lyons Partnership v. Giannoulas, 179 F.3d 384 (5th Cir. 1999), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld summary judgment in favor of accused infringer Giannoulas in a trademark infringement case brought by the owner of the rights in Barney the Purple (and Annoying) Dinosaur.

The case arose out of the Barney Empire’s displeasure with the parody of Barney that Giannoulas, otherwise known as The Chicken (that madcap sporting event entertainer), put in his act. Two delicious paragraphs from the Fifth Circuit’s opinion:

And so, perhaps inevitably, the Chicken’s beady glare came to rest on that lovable and carefree icon of childhood, Barney. Lyons argues that the Chicken’s motivation was purely mercenary. Seeing the opportunity to hitch his wagon to a star, the Chicken incorporated a Barney look-alike into his acts. The character, a person dressed in a costume (sold with the title “Duffy the Dragon”) that had a remarkable likeness to Barney’s appearance, would appear next to the Chicken in an extended performance during which the Chickenwould flip, slap, tackle, trample, and generally assault the Barney look-alike.

… The sketch would begin with the Chicken disco dancing. The Barney character would join the Chicken on the field and dance too, but in an ungainly manner that mimicked the real Barney’s dance. The Chicken would then indicate that Barney should try to follow the Chicken’s dance steps (albeit, by slapping the bewildered dinosaur across the face). At this point, Barney would break character and out-dance the Chicken, to the crowd’s surprise. The Chicken would then resort to violence, tackling Barney and generally assaulting Barney. Barney would ultimately submit to the Chicken and they would walk off the field apparently friends, only for the Chicken to play one last gag on the back-in-character naive and trusting Barney. The Chicken would flip Barney over a nearby obstacle, such as a railing.

“Barney would ultimately submit to The Chicken,” indeed. On the question of parody, the Fifth Circuit concluded as follows: “We therefore agree with the district court that Giannoulas’s use of the caricature clearly qualifies as a parody. We note that Lyons’s insistence that the Chicken’s act is not a parody is, in our view, a completely meritless argument.” Memo to Barney’s lawyers: Ouch!
Why am I writing about this seven year old case now?

Because Barney’s lawyers don’t appear to have learned anything from the sound drubbing The Chicken delivered.

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.”

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 let me take the opportunity to point, once again, the Brennan Center report entitled “Will Fair Use Survive?”, which you can read about and download here.

A good summary story about the Canada Supreme Court’s unanimous trademark decisions last Friday (rightly) rejecting two (overreaching) infringement claims. The story’s opening paragraphs:

Barbie dolls are superficial and bland and are unlikely to be confused with sizzling steaks at the independent Montreal chain of Barbie restaurants, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in a trademark case Friday.

The court also prevented the champagne house Veuve Clicquot from stopping an upstart Canadian women’s clothing chain from using the name Les Boutiques Cliquot even though the stores admitted to being inspired by the French bubbly.

You can read the Canada Supreme Court’s opinions, in Mattel and in Veuve Clicquot.

UPDATE:  David French, of Canada Patent Blog, summarizes the cases this way:

These two decisions are interesting, but not surprising. No doubt many attorneys for large corporations will be stirred-up by this short-fall in their ability to protect their client’s interests in famous marks in Canada. The lesson to be learned is that the Supreme Court of Canada still feels that the trademark law, at least in Canada, exists to protect the public against confusion, and not to protect corporations from loss of trade.

To which I can only add: thank heaven for the Supreme Court of Canada.