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The site BestofStLouis.com is gone. There isn’t even a traditional “It’s over” page…it’s just gone. The domain now goes to an all-ad page.

What happened? Lawyers and copyright law happened, and the heat came from the Riverfront Times.

As we’re sure you’re aware, each year the Riverfront Times puts out its “Best of St. Louis” issue and because of that believes it holds the rights to the term “Best of St. Louis”. That seems week to us that someone can own something as generic as that, but we aren’t lawyers and the Riverfront Times’ parent company Village Voice Media didn’t bother to call and ask our opinion, so they went ahead and sent one of those oh-so-fun legal notices to the two guys that ran BestofStLouis.com. They were “graciously” given until September 1st to take their site down.

Just as they should have, BestofStLouis.com posted the letter on their site, but instead of trying to fight this, or at least work with Village Voice Media, they just hung it up claiming they were “hacked”. Pseudo-claiming the hack came from some mysterious Village Voice Media executive order.

[F]aced with the prospect of trying to resurrect our site from its hacked and smoldering ashes only to tear it down by September 1st to comply with a legal order we have no resources to fight, we said “fuck it.”

*Sigh*

You lost us guys.

BestofStLouis.com, run by Max Bemberg, Ben DeMeyer and Alex Luft, were standing on that methaphorical street corner saying the RFT was bullying them and people were feeling it, getting behind the little guy…and then they pushed it…”Oh and we think they had hackers attack our website.” they might as well have said “…once the RFT rolls out their alien news print brainwashing technology their plan will be complete!”

To the Riverfront Time’s credit they did post about this item on their DailyRFT blog last Friday and allowed comments which, overall, carried a mixed sentiment.

Meanwhile at Punching Kitty headquarters (…which is a mountain with a giant kitty-head carved in to it. It’s over by Grand and Natural Bridge Road, you wouldn’t have seen it.)

One more St. Louis website bites the dust and we take a step closer to being that web-version of Boardwalk with 2 big red hotels on it. A few more fake cease-and-desist letters and us, along with our army of hackers, will rule the St. Louis website world!!

Oh, and CityTV with your “Best of STL”?! Nice try. We all know “STL” is just short of “St. Louis”! You’re next.

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“Its all thanks to North Face.”

“When they tried to take me to court, it was like the best Christmas present ever.”

oh and…

“I really don’t know [why the North Face is trying to sue me].  I don’t see any similarities between the two companies.”

Those are the words from Mizzou student and owner of the now famous parody brand “The South Butt”.

Jimmy Winkelmann [Editor's Note: Great freaking name! Seriously.] was recently interviewed by KSDK and came off calm, cool (totally rad?), and more than a little innocent as to trademark law.  (View the interview after the jump)

Will Jimmy lose this case?

From our research…probably.  Here’s what we found pertaining to copyright law and parody logos (Publaw.com):

Since copyright law prohibits the substantial use of a copyrighted work without permission of the copyright owner, and because such permission is highly unlikely when the use is to create a parody, it may be necessary for the parodist to rely on the fair-use defense to forestall any liability for copyright infringement. However, the fair-use defense if successful will only be successful when the newly created work that purports itself to be parody is a valid parody.

Although not every commercial use is presumptively an unfair use, and therefore conclusively determinative against fair use, this criterion emphasizes a preference that fair use will be granted to those works that are created for noncommercial or educational purposes rather than for commercial purposes.

The burden of proving fair use is usually much easier to demonstrate if the new work is for one of the “favored” purposes: criticism, comment, scholarship, research, news reporting or teaching

Winkelmann’s only hope is 2 Live Crew.  Yes 2 Live Crew’s case with Roy Orbison about the “parody” song “Pretty Woman”.  After going to the Supreme Court, 2 Live Crew’s version that they release and sold, was found to be a parody and thus protected, because they were found to be making a criticism of the original song.

There Jimmy Winkelmann, is your legal safe house.  Go there now.

You can get your own South Butt gear, while you can, at thesouthbutt.com

Oh and for the record, we think all of this is freaking hilarious.

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