I did my best to search for a thread on this already, but my connection keeps timing out and I gave up.
Did anyone else think it a little plagiaristic for Playboy to have a feature article (yes, I READ the magazine!) called, “The Straight Dope”? I searched in vain for some mention of Uncle Cecil, and then wondered if he needed a good lawyer!
What’s the article about? Legally, you can’t copyright a title, but I’m not sure what the situation is when the title of an article is a trademark. I doubt it amounts to anything, unless the article includes text from Cecil’s columns and books without proper attribution.
It wouldn’t be plagiarism unless they included some actual content. In this case, it might be a trademark violation, which has been discussed at length:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=213965
The article is about debunking myths Snopes style, mainly about drug use and drug lore. (“Was Elvis a DEA agent?”)
It came pretty darn close to the weekly column Cecil produces, hence my surprise at the title. I can certainly see some confused Doper buying the Mag to see what Cecil had to say in Playboy, then being very disappointed. The confusion of a trademarked column name seems to me to be the stuff of which litigation is made.
I’m not a trademark lawyer, but I don’t believe a private entity can corner the market on an already-extant phrase. Yes, maybe the Playboy column does tread the same ground as Cecil’s, but the phrase “the straight dope” was around long before either – and they’re not even using the phrase in a non-standard way. A similar question was raised in the Fox suit vs. Al Franken, and the judge said that he thought the mark was weak for this reason.
–Cliffy
Another lawer who doesn’t specialize in trademark chiming in:
Publisher Clay Felker once paid good money for the right to the trademarked name “New York”.
No, this could not cause trouble for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Yankees, etc. It could, however, effectively block anyone else from using the phrase as the name of a magazine while Felker was publishing a magazine (and thus maintaining his trademark) called, simply, “New York”.
Similarly, anyone publishing a question-and-answer column called “The Straight Dope” could face the mighty wrath of Cecil.
Had the Playboy article somehow given the impression that it was connected to or endorsed by Cecil there might be a problem. In something of the same vein, Spike Lee tried to block the use of the name "Spike TV’ by arguing that people would “naturally” assume he was responsible for the cable channel (not to mention thinking he was responsible for the old Sugar and Spike comics and The Spike Jones Orchestra).
I’m not sure this is the same issue, slipster. The phrase “the straight dope” means specifically the giving of accurate information on a topic that is mis- or poorly understood. If “The Straight Dope” were, in fact, a newspaper column about growing healthy marijuana plants, the mark would have more value.
Imagine if the Playboy column (or Cecil’s, for that matter) were called something else and some person asked the author what he did for a living, he might say “I write a column that gives folks the straight dope.” In that way it’s fundamentally different than the New York magazine case – if someone asked Felker the same question, he wouldn’t say “I publish the largest city in the U.S.” New York is a place, and places aren’t published.
–Cliffy
Weren’t they called The City Slickers?