Copyright and trademark are, in concept, beautiful things. The former protect the fruits of one’s labors for a time so as to encourage innovation and creativity. The latter protects consumers from fraudulent attempts to confuse them as to a product’s origin, and protects the reputation of the entity the trademark represents.
When misused, though, both concepts are dangerous. Sometimes to a laughable degree.
So take the case of Urinal.net, a site that lets people post pictures of men’s urinals from various locations. Kinda weird, but that describes about 99% of non-commercial Internet sites (including this one) and about 50% of the commercial ones, so who am I to complain?
A year ago, someone posted a picture of a urinal there, identifying it as being at the Toronto Lester B. Pearson International Airport, which is operated by the Greater Toronto Airport Authority. The GTAA responded that it was unlawful for Urinal.net to mention the airport name. Urinal.net complied with their request to remove the name (whilst describing the airport using everything but its name), but noted that the GTAA had made them take the info down — at which point the GTAA said that using their name would lead to legal action, too.
Now another “outraged” locale is taking things further. Not only does the Marco Beach Ocean Resort apparently claim that to refer to them in association with a photo of a urinal from their site is a violation of their trademark — but said location’s lawyers claim that the cease-and-desist letter sent to Urinal.net cannot be forwarded or reprinted because it’s copyrighted.
Now, flash back to what those purposes of trademark and copyright were again …
Urinal.net amusingly explains what they can about the situation here. They could fight the matter, perhaps, but who can afford lawyers (assuming they could actually show the c&d letter to one without getting into copyright trouble) to protect a “hobby” site.
Of course, in doing this, the folks at Marco Beach Ocean Resort seem unaware that far more people will look at the picture, and associate their name with it, than ever would have happened had they left well enough alone …
(via BoingBoing)
I just invented a new acronym to describe this kind of thing: HLWL (pronounced hulwil). It stands for “Humorless Losers With Lawyers.”