Was a Contract Formed?

Marc in tights?

Jennifer suggests a cute idea for Halloween. Natalia will go as Tinkerbell. Jennifer will be Wendy. I should be Peter Pan. This is appropriate for many reasons.

I laugh and say “yes, that sounds adorable.”

Then, I see Jennifer with a grin that seems just a tad over-sized.

“God damn it! You are gonna make me wear green tights, aren’t you? No deal,” I said.

Two lawyers in the car say “nope, you made a contract. We are witnesses to it. You can’t back out.”

I’m not seeing how there could have been detrimental reliance on my gratuitous promise to perform — especially since the span between the acceptance and the repudiation was only about 30 seconds.

I need a good lawyer.

The Only Thing on Twitter Worth Reading

Twitter is stupid. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it until it goes the hell away (or at least evolves into something worthwhile).

That said, Shit My Dad Says is frigging awesome. Twitter should just shut down all the other twitter accounts and sell ads on this guy’s feed.

Unethical or just plain stupid? A “thin DMCA letter”

If this is an accurate picture, she couldn't even fit her head in her pants. In stark contrast, Ralph Lauren's lawyer practices law with her head up her ass.

Ralph Lauren makes its first stupid move — photoshopping a model so that she looks like something you’d get a blowjob from in Roswell, New Mexico.

That’s dumb move number one.

So then a few blogs pick up the picture, making fun of it, including BoingBoing.

Ralph Lauren then hires an attorney to write this piece of shit DMCA notice. (courtesy of craphound). For the uninitiated, a web host will usually remove something from its servers in response to a DMCA notice. Not this time.

Hilarity ensues as BoingBoing’s web host not only refuses to comply, but BoingBoing opens up the Streisand Effect whup ass.

[I]nstead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we’re gonna mock them. Hence this post.

As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, “Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that’s different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I’ve rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter.”

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn’t give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models. (source)

Heee heee, get it? Wendy is funny.

Numbskull, the DMCA is for copyright infringement — not for fair use. If you don’t know what fair use means, you shouldn’t be sending out DMCA notices. Why not? Because the DMCA, she bite sometimes. Well not only that, but abusing intellectual property law to suppress criticism is fucking unethical.

Hat Tip to Staci K.

Sometimes Negativity is Just So Funny

Even when it is directed at me. I simply can’t stop laughing at this comment someone made about me in the Boston Herald:

Randazza is well known around the North Shore as a slimy liberal incompetent moonbat home-schooled moron lawyer. Good luck to him. (source)

I liked this one too:

he has a face that you just want to whip apples at (Randazza that is) (source)

The North Face claims that consumers don’t know their heads from their asses

by Jason Fischer

Clothing producer, The North Face (TNF), recently got a lesson in how bad trademark enforcement decisions can make a company look silly. It seems a St. Louis teen thought that it would be amusing to create a clothing line parody, calling it “The South Butt,” — south being the logical opposite of north and butt being… well… you get the idea. TNF was not amused, however, and they set their attorneys to attack mode, sending a cease and desist letter to the college freshman (source).

TNF’s letter asserted that use of the “South Butt” logo (pictured below) constitutes an infringement of their own federally registered trademark (pictured above). On its face, TNF’s claim is not so unreasonable. As any trademark owner (who has a decent attorney) can tell you, trademark rights can be lost if you don’t enforce them. TNF must, in order to maintain its ability to sue legitimate infringers, actively look for unauthorized uses of its logo. However, owning federal trademark rights does not mean you can stop every use of your mark that you don’t like. Federal trademark law was created to prevent consumers from becoming confused about the source of goods, not give complete exclusionary rights in logos, words, and phrases. It certainly wasn’t meant to give companies the power to stifle criticism — a point that corporate attorneys seem to frequently fail to explain to their clients.

In order to be actionable as an infringement, the South Butt logo must be likely to cause confusion in the minds of the consuming public. In other words, if “an idiot in a hurry” would not be able to tell the difference between these two logos, then TNF could conceivably stop South Butt from using their logo. I think South Butt’s attorney states the issue with TNF’s claim pretty well:

I did try to explain with a great deal of candor to counsel for the North Face that the general public is aware of the difference between a face and a butt. (source)

The irony is that, as many other companies have learned in the past, over enforcing your trademark rights can have the exact opposite effect from the one that you intended. In this case, only a few people were even aware of the “South Butt” brand before TNF took any action. Presumably, TNF wanted to suppress this innocent gibe at their popular brand, but instead, they only managed to boost web traffic at shop.thesouthbutt.com.

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This story has also been published on The Tactical IP Blog.

“What About the Children” FINALLY Fails!

Dirty Linda Sanchez

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-California) is the latest moron to cry “what about the children?” while trying to score cheap political points while wiping her ass with the First Amendment. Sanchez took a swipe at free speech by proposing the “Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act.” Yes, another law named after a dead kid. That almost never ends well for free speech (or any other kind of freedom for that matter).

Here is part of what her bill would criminalize.

(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

(b) As used in this section —

(1) the term ‘communication’ means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; and

(2) the term ‘electronic means’ means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages.

In other words, this entire blog would probably be illegal. I will state with no equivocation that I regularly try and cause substantial emotional distress when I write about dumbasses who try and mess with my First Amendment. I want them to curl up in their bedrooms at night, sobbing and weeping from feeling guilty for their sins against the Constitution. I want them to feel so much distress that they repent and atone for their crimes. No luck yet, but at least I manage to educate my readers about these flunkies and asshats.

According to Wired, her bill got a chilly reception in committee from both Republicans and Democrats. However, in an exclusive interview, Mr. Bartow Dworkin, the president of the International Association of Imbeciles, and a full time law professor, supported the bill.

We believe that when people are mean to other people on teh internets, this is sexist and racist and ummm, WHAT ABOUT TEH CHILDREN? It is bad enough that we are confused about what might have happened to our favorite race-baiting website, but don’t our leaders understand the gravity of this situation? A child died! It must NEVER happen again. Nobody must ever die again, or else people will die.

Dworkin then ran off to his subcommittee meeting of the ABA’s “future of the legal profession” meeting without further comment, but he did tell us that we needed to read the law review article “Cyber Civil Rights.” “Here, take this,” he said. However, the pages were all stuck together, so we weren’t able to read the article. We did line a bird cage with the pages, but the bird chose to die from jaundice rather than suffer the indignity of having to shit in the presence of such stupidity.

I would give a full discussion of what a piece of garbage Sanchez’ bill is, but Eugene Volokh already pwned it in his Huffington Post article.

WTF, Wisconsin?! You Disappoint Me . . .

Before

By: Zac Papantoniou

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years (or possibly living “off the grid” in the back-woods of Wisconsin), you may not know that “WTF” has become a commonplace acronym for asking, “What the Fuck?” (Source). Apparently, no one told this to the people in charge at the old “Wisconsin Tourism Federation (WTF),” because once the blog “YourLogoMakesMeBarf.com” got a hold of the WTF’s logo (which prominently displayed the letters, “WTF,” above the organization’s name) and a few of the blog’s commenters had some fun with Wisconsin’s little word-blunder, the WTF took notice, and renamed themselves as the, “Tourism Federation of Wisconsin (TFW).” But the question that begs to be asked is . . . WTF?!

Wisconsin, I want to speak to you for a moment. You are “America’s Dairyland,” the land of the “Cheesehead,” and the Green Bay Packers. Wisconsin, you are known for your freezing weather bringing out legions of painted, shirtless, fat dudes, who catch flying football players in their arms, while those players are doing something called the “Lambeau Leap.”

Wisconsin, with a beer-brat in one hand and a “Milwaukee’s Best” in the other, you are that one uncle that gets drunk at the family reunion and accidently hits on your barely-legal niece . . . much to the chagrin and uncomfortable laughter of the rest of the family.

....and after.

Wisconsin, you are the unofficial home of Vince Lombardi, and Brett Fav . . . ok, scratch the last one . . . you are tough, fun, easy to get along with and could care less what the rest of us in the other 49 states think about your somewhat backwards (but always amusing) ways. So, why change the damn name of your tourism department, just because a couple of internet geeks got their jollies making fun of your logo . . . WTF?!

Wisconsin, you disappoint me. You could have left the name/logo the same and in a couple months, no one would have noticed; now, your name/logo change is being written about all the way across the pond (that’s in the U.K. for those not hip to the script). The limey’s are making fun of you now . . . we saved their ass in “the Big One”! Wisconsin, I still like you, but with a heavy heart I now have to nominate you for the “Ass-Hat of the Day Award.”

Jack Thompson Didn’t Get the AutoAdmit Memo

Apparently Jack Thompson, asshat of the century, is suing Facebook because Facebook won’t stop its members from being mean to him. (complaint here, courtesy of Popehat).

Naturally, it is 31 flavors of batshit crazy — just what you would expect from Jack. Speaking of Popehat, no sense in analyzing the complaint when Ken does an ass kicking job of it over at our soul-brother blawg.

I will, however, offer up a comparison.

As batshit nutty as ol’ Jack can be, and this case is no exception, his legal theory isn’t really all that original. This is pretty much the same legal theory that the Auto Admit plaintiffs tried to use against one of the employees of that site. Compare this complaint to Jack’s.

Personally, I think that Jack’s is more well written. The only real difference between the two is that I’d bet that Jack would actually be fun to hang out with, if you could get him to agree to keep certain topics off the table. (Jack, for what it’s worth, if you read this, I hereby invite you out for a night of getting shitfaced). In the Auto Admit case, there’s nothing but sanctimonious patrician whining.