Words Fail

by Will on July 13, 2009

Ken at Popehat documents a truly astounding feat of asshattery.

Tagged as: Guiness Book of World Records, Idiocy

Will writes from Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, Virginia). You can reach him at willblogcorrespondence at gmail dot com.

{ 1 comment }

1 Mark Thompson July 14, 2009 at 7:12 am

I saw that last night, started to write a comment on it, but didn’t finish for some reason.

Anyhow, the scary thing is that Guiness’ actions may well be on firm legal footing under UK trademark law. AFAIK, the UK does not have an equivalent of the fair use defense and it’s trademark laws are notoriously overprotective – they’re why the McMahon, Inc. is no longer able to call itself WWF; had that case been brought in the US, it would have gotten laughed out of court on grounds that there was no likelihood of confusion.

Additionally, a big part of the reason why there’s a fair use defense in US trademark law is that we have the First Amendment. There is not generally a UK equivalent.

I’m just not sure that Failblog would be subject to UK trademark jurisdiction, which is outside the scope of my knowledge.

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