So Penny Arcade did a single strip which used Strawberry Shortcake (the character, not the sounds-great-but-tastes-just-OK dessert), and made fun of her.
They got a cease-and-desist letter from American Greetings.
Wotta buncha ass!
Before somebody informs me that satire and parody involves a balance of free speech weighed against copyright protection, save your pixels - I know.
But it was just a single strip in a comic strip aimed at people much too old to ever give a rat’s ass about Strawberry Freakin’ Shortcake - what possible damage could the character really suffer?
It comes down to corporate bullying - this was fair use, PA wasn’t profiting by using the name of Strawberry Shortcake (how many Strawberry Shortcake fans are going to flock to PA now?), and American Greetings are jerks.
Heh. I read PA , and I’ve played American McGee’s Alice, so I thought it was funny. I’m thinking this is just part of that protect-your-copyright-or-you-lose-it auto-lawyering thing that goes on in the U.S., but who knows. I figure if “the system” makes you have to launch legal crap any anyone who does anymore than think about your product, something is wrong.
PA has got a link that implies that since they are not really making fun of A, but using A to make fun of B, they might have a problem. I hope not.
In any case, if they were actually trying to prevent this thing from getting around (and PA is already pretty big), they failed massively, since Slashdot got it about 6 seconds later.
It is problematic that PA isn’t really protected by parody laws since they are NOT parodying Strawberry Shortcake but using that product to take a shot at American McGee (as Nanoda said).
Despite that, I think it is a poor move on American Greetings part and that they will no doubt regret the negative spin this will get from PA’s tubing of them and then almost immediately being slash dotted. The petition linked from the PA site has 8000 signatures in less than 24 hours.
PA did the right thing in taking the piece down while they looked into their legal position.