What is this ridiculousness? Mastercard is suing Ralph Nader for using their ad style as a parody for his own hilarious ad, saying that it was a ripoff. Thanks to the suit, I got to see that great ad for the first time. I thought:
The Supreme Court ruled that parody is protected speech-- Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988).
The ad agency, not Mastercard, has the copyrights to the style used in the ad. Otherwise, Jim Varney rest his soul, wouldn’t have been able to do TV ads for 300 companies using his ‘nosy neighbor’ skit.
Is Mastercard really thinking that we would be so stupid as to think that Nader is “deceiv[ing], mislead[ing] and confus[ing] consumers and the purchasing public into believing that Ralph Nader and specifically his candidacy is in someway connected with MasterCard”? Or does Mastercard thought, as I do, that the ad was too well done? Too bad the ad would be pulled off on tonight anyway for financial reasons other than the lawsuit. That is, unless the media would play it on their news broadcasts every day (wow, talking about a great way to get free ad time!!).
Mastercard should be very careful fighting Nader, the champion of customers. GM and others corporations tried and failed. Besides, Mastercard and Visa are under fire for colluding on how to treat the businesses that allows Visa and Mastercard for purchases, as well as gouging customers with fees such as late payments triggered if payment doesn’t reach their payment centers in Elbow Lake, Minnesota by 9am on payment due date (an exaggeration, but not by much).
I payed off this Mastercard I have; now I will cancel it. Gore made a great speech tonight, but I still say “Go, Ralph, Go!”
That is lame. They won’t win and this will only call attention to Nader’s campaign (good!) which is probably the opposite of what they want. Hasn’t that commercial been spoofed by like a dozen other things anyway?
Irony:
One of the things I’ve heard Nader discuss has been corporate ‘censorship lawsuits’, where a huge corporation sues the bejeezus out of anyone who speaks against them, knowing that even if the case is not winnable most organizations cannot afford to put up a fight and will give up.
Unfortunately, I forget if Nader was in favor of loser pays or outlawing such suits or what. Oh well, it should make for an interesting show.
Nader was trained as a lawyer plus some of his fellow “Nader’s Raiders” are probably lawyers too. I’d imagine they can defend this lawsuit on the cheap.
Reminded me of a funny case I ran across by accident a while back: Eveready Battery Co. v. Adolph Coors Co., 765 F.Supp. 440 (1991). Some of y’all should be old enough to remember the problem advertisement: Leslie Nielsen, wearing bunny ears and a fluffy tail, walked out at the end of an ad beating a drum with the Coors Light logo. Eveready, owner of Energizer, wasn’t too happy.
The best part is the court’s list of differences between Leslie Nielsen and the Energizer Bunny:
I laugh every time I think of a judge sitting down and writing that…
Hey, you never know when you’ll come across a judge who is humor-impaired; apparently, the parody defense hasn’t always worked.
Some years ago I worked in the intellectual property group of a legal publisher, where I spent most of my time updating statutes, regulations, etc. Two cases I came across were rather memorable. In one, Jordache won a suit against the manufacturer of “Lardache” jeans for big women (complete with pig’s head logo on the back pocket); in the other, Mutual of Omaha won a case against some poor sap who’d done a spoof called “Mutant of Omaha.”
Why did the defendants lose? Each judge ruled that there was a likelihood of confusion between the defendants’ take-offs and the plaintiffs’ products that could cause damage to the plaintiff. I hate to think what that “likelihood of confusion” implies about the current state of education in this country. (“Whut, y’mean ‘mutant’ ain’t the same thing as ‘mutual’?”)