legal

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

“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.

[Read 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? [Read More]

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. [Read More]