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.

Get ready recently widowed women who’s husbands were in the business of something we don’t like! You are one boring Saturday with us having posterboard and markers laying around from us getting in your face! Missouri has re-legalized funeral protests.

U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan ruled the laws violate the right of free speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Gaitan concluded Missouri officials did not demonstrate the protest restrictions served a significant government interest nor that they had been narrowly tailored to prevent the harm of interruptions of funeral services. The judge wrote he was sympathetic to the argument people attending a funeral deserve some protection but noted a federal appeals court already had previously rejected that argument.

Why would we have this rule and why is this even newsworthy that the previous law has been overturned? That would be the lovely people of that same church the protested the St. Louis Lady Gaga concert. (See Some Dumbass Church Will Be on a St. Louis Hate Speech Tour This Weekend and Bigots Picketing Lady Gaga at Scottrade Center)

[Missouri Attorney General] Koster also plans to appeal Gaitan’s latest ruling, said spokeswoman Nanci Gonder.

Isn’t that something you just that have to say when you lose a legal case? “We’re going to appeal! All the way to the supreme court if we have to!” It seems to be said every time without fail. No one ever just says “Well shit. Whatever!” or “Eh. They were right anyway.” but it sure would be refreshing.

Of course, baring any un-written lawyer rules, “Eh. They were right anyway.” is what Koster should have said. Yes, protesting a funeral, especially because they were simply gay rather than a serial molester or Nazi, is messed up, but free speech is both good and bad. You gotta have both.

The move here is pass a law that says anyone protesting funeral can’t press charges for physical non-weapon related violence on the funeral grounds.

While you’re at it, add a rider on there to pass a law that says ass-less pants are cool at Walmart. You can’t sell jeans and scissors and not expect that kind of thing!

via Yahoo! News

The state of Missouri is playing the role of John Wilkes Booth and is out gunning for the President’s Casino.  The goal is to get the casino to close its doors by as early as July.

“[President Casino] has continued to operate the President at an unacceptable level through a deliberate minimization of offerings with a resulting decline in performance,” Gene McNary, executive director of the Missouri Gaming Commission, wrote in a letter last week to John Giovenco, interim chief executive of Las Vegas-based Pinnacle. “We … are no longer able to allow the licensure of an obsolete and underachieving gaming facility in the State of Missouri.”

Of course the Casino, owned by Pinnacle Entertainment, is trying to hold off the moves by filling a petition saying it will do some of the fixes, but not all of them, because they don’t want to look too good.  Chicks dig you more if you look like you don’t care.

“It has become abundantly clear Pinnacle intends to hold on to the President’s license as long as possible with no intention of improving its operations,”

So you think there is business owner out there that intends to do the minimum possible just to simply maximize their profits?!  Say it ain’t so!

Who knows what could happen here, but we have strong sources that the state’s prosecutor is really trying to kill the President’s Casino just to impress Jodie Foster.

Any of these Presidential gags working for  you?  Feel free to drop your own in the comments.

via St. Louis Business Journal

“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.

(more…)

Remember this post from a while back?  We found a video on YouTube of a young, mustachioed Charles Jaco (Now of Fox2) on CNN.  The commentary bookending the video says that Jaco “faked” this news report and that it was all filmed in a studio.

Lets be clear: Those views, as we stated in the post, are of the video maker’s.  Not ours.  Frankly that was pretty clear.

From the post “Did Charles Jaco Fake a Desert Storm CNN Report?“:

Found on YouTube, this clip from a 1991 CNN broadcast, with added subtitles, claims that CNN and then reporter, now Fox 2 KTVI reporter and 550AM host, Charles Jaco faked a remote, leading people to believe that they were in some hostile area rather than a soundstage of sorts.

After watching the video, I have to lean towards agreeing this this guy, but really who knows, and more importantly, no one does or should care, but the video is pretty damn funny.

We agreed it looked kinda fake, but in the end we clearly state “who knows?”.  Nothing wrong there right?  Nope….well unless you are Charles Jaco, who thinks people reporting on thing they find and asking questions about things is wrong.  Did I mention Jaco is a Fox 2 news reporter?

Last night we received this from Mr. Jaco himself:

I have just now come across a false and defamatory posting on your website from July 28, 2009 titled “Did Charles Jaco Fake a Desert Storm CNN Report”. I’m adding your email and your website to the list being sent to my attorneys.
———————

Some of you have written me expressing concern (or as one friend put it “WTF?”) about a video making the rounds purporting to show that our Gulf War coverage for CNN in 1991 was done in a studio, not in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait. This email should fill you in as to what’s going on.

Others have written me to accuse me of engaging in false news coverage, and a cover-up of the truth. Many of those same people have forwarded those false and defamatory emails to others, and have linked to a website purporting to show the false coverage. This email serves as notice of legal action.

First the facts of the case: our coverage was on the roof of a hotel and military facility near the intersection of the two main runways at the Dhahran Air Base, Western Province, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The playwood background was erected as a guard against sand and wind storms. The clowning around on the video is just that. We used black humor to deflect the tension of covering SCUD missile assaults.

Now to the impending action: my attorneys intend to act immediately against those of you receiving this who have sent and forwarded these emails accusing me of falsifying coverage. We are in the process of issuing subpeonas to ISPs for the real names and addresses of the senders. We shall then proceed with lawsuits against those parties.

In addition, letters are being sent to LiveLink and Google (owner of YouTube) and their attorneys demanding the videos be removed.
—————–

Charles Jaco

To which we replied:

Mr. Jaco,

Maybe you didn’t actually read the post about you on Punching Kitty.com and instead just spammed every google result for your name, but we, at no times, made any claims to the validity of the video. In fact the whole post is a question as to whether the video you are referring to is legitimate.

Because of those reasons, I will not be taking down the post in question. As a reporter yourself, I would have thought that you would know that there is nothing illegal or wrong with asking questions.

As for the video in question, that is between you and the poster on YouTube and has nothing to do with this site.

I will not be bullied with emails like this, however, if you would like to post a reply or talk about this subject further than what is in your initial email, I would love to include that on my site.

I will be posting this entire exchange on my site.

Mike Flynn
Editor of Punching Kitty.com

I had pretty much no opinion of Charles Jaco up until last night at around 10p, but this really did shock me.  Could a reporter really think we did something wrong?!  Hell, even the title of our post was a question…far from the harsh accusation that Mr. Jaco believes happened.

As far as the video, if Mr. Jaco wants to contact Google/YouTube about the video, thats between him, Google and the video publisher.  According to documents on EFF.org about the legality of embedding YouTube videos, I am under no obligation to remove the video from my site until the intellectual property holder gets in contact with me, which in the case of the CNN clips in the video is Time-Warner, not Charles Jaco.

We hope that is was a misunderstanding, that upon further review Mr. Jaco will realize that we did nothing wrong in asking the question and in fact posting his email did allow him to put his side of the story out there.  We would have loved it if he would have just sent us an email telling his side without threats, which we would have happily posted here as well.  Instead he tried to bully a website he thought would bend to his will, into removing simple, innocent questions.

Remember that next time you see him “reporting” on Fox 2.

Steiner Sports Marketing think so and they Yadi’s little memory slip means he should pay them about $175,000.   Which would be the $90,660 that they paid the Cardinals catcher to do the session and then another $84,340 for whatever.

Would our big eared Yadi skip out on an event he was already paid to do?  Who knows, but we think a lawsuit like this is probably initiated because they have some pretty solid evidence.

It always amazes us when athletes or celebs do this kind of thing.  Do you think they won’t be able to find you?  The whole reason you got the gig is because people know who you are!  …I guess 175,00 isn’t all that much when you are a ballplayer, but still, isn’t really more about just not being a douche?

Via TMZ

Photo Credit: Flickr user localozarkian