Remember when The North Face went after a college student and his company called “The South Butt” for producing parody apparel?
The student, Jimmy Winkelman, refused to cease and desist, and now they’ve gone to court. Read Winkelman’s hilarious Answer, filed earlier this month, wherein it is pointed out that “the public is well aware of the difference between a face and a butt.”
And it says he’s fighting the lawsuit “to protect the integrity of the marketplace, freedom of choice for the consumer, freedom of speech for all, and the fundamental tenets of capitalism, competition, and the American Way.” Heroic!
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Okay, that’s funny…I don’t care who y’are!
The answer is indeed a HILARIOUS read, worth whatever comedy award out there for a written work!
Wow. All the debased money of our times wouldn’t buy a better advertisement for The South Butt. Then in The North someone’s gonna get education about the Streisand effect , as it hits them onto their precious Face.
I saw a needlepoint sampler once, which read:
(Not all that rhymes is a poem, not everything with two cheeks is a face.)
Apparently, not everyone can easily distinguish between a face and a butt.
This is very similar to a case ( Or rather, several) thats been bubbling in South Africa for years.
ONe Justin Nurse carved himself a niche ( Under the name ‘Laugh it off’) printing T shirts parodying highly recognised corporate logos and advertisements. He’s done scores of them over the last decade.
2 examples deserve describing here.
The first was a parody of First National Bank , whose logo is a thorn tree profiled against a rising sun, with the strapline ‘First National Bank: How can we help you?’. Laugh it off’s take on it replaced the tree with a marijuana leaf, and amended the strapline ‘Firth African drug culture, the st National Bankie, how can we help you?’ ( To explain, in South Africa, the most common packaging of cannabis is a bank bag, known as a bankie).
First national’s official response was magnificent silence, but off the record some of its executives declared that they found it quite funny.
Not so SABmiller’s response to the parody of its Carling Black label product, rendered in the instantly recognisable logo format as ‘Black Labour, white guilt’. SABmiller dragged Nurse through the courts at a cost of millions of rands, and Nurse, to his credit did not back down as many others would have in th eface of th ecorporate juggernaut. the constitutional course eventually found in his favour, which reaffirmed the right of comedians everyhwere to poke fun at the large and powerful.
“North Face has elected to depict the commercial undertakings of South Butt … as “piracy,” evoking not intellectual property issues, but crimes on the high seas, perhaps the South Seas …”
Gold.
I have a feeling that the cheeky style in which this Answer is written was at least partly inspired by the Introduction to the Complaint that North Face filed.
I have read far too many of those corporate, self-important, white shoe law firm Complaints, and they are nothing if not haughty, blustery, imperious, offended, aggrieved, outraged and generally pompous.
I have a feeling that South Butt’s attorneys would not have been so flippant unless the Plaintiff’s attorney’s ridiculousness had not first opened the door for them.
Further research reveals that the Complaint was prepared by lawyers at the New York office at Greenberg Traurig.
There are soulless,corporate, as&#ole lawyers, and then there’s Greenberg lawyers. In a field that’s exceedingly crowded, Greenberg Traurig sets new standards for over-reaching, self-important, sociopathic, narcissistic, humorless grinds. I hope they get their asses handed to them in Missouri.
I wonder if they would get bent out of shape over The West Hip or The East Armpit?
I can’t wait to see the Judge’s response, especially to this.
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