Screwed by the Lawyers: Difference between revisions

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== Anime & Manga ==

== Anime and Manga ==

* The spectacular legal pileup on both sides of the Pacific Ocean between multiple rightsholders in the ''[[Super Dimension Fortress Macross]]'' franchise has ensured that precious little of the franchise [[No Export for You|can ever be released in the United States]]:

** Bandai was going to release the video game ''Macross VFX II'' in the US—even released a demo disc with one of the major game magazines. Harmony Gold forced them to stop.

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== Newspaper Comics ==

* ''[[Garfield]]'' had a short run of ''Believe it, or don't'' gags... until PAWS Inc. got a cease-and-desist letter from the [[Ripley's Believe It or Not!|Robert Ripley]] estate.

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== Other ==

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* Some years ago a British food company produced a brand of chips [fries] called Stringfellows, which had to be withdrawn when nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow objected to the name.

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* [[McDonald's|McDonald's Corp.]] tried to force a Scottish fine dining establishment named McDonald's to close or change its name despite the latter being in business for over a century. The fast food chain lost the case. It helped that the Scottish restaurant was run by a high member of Clan McDonald.

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** McDonald's Corp. also attempted this in Malaysia, except that the dining establishment in question was a small Indian-Muslim restaurant whose only offense is that its name vaguely resembled McDonald's. The fast food chain lost that case, too.

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** One of the cases they did win was to convince a San Francisco coffeeshop to change its name from McCoffee, whose name was a [[Incredibly Lame Pun|pun]] on the name of the owner Elizabeth McCaughey, a good ''decade'' before they got into the coffee business themselves. These and many other examples can be found at [[The Other Wiki]].

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*** The reason that it's not particularly common to see parodies that use fast-food chains named "Mc-anything", or real-life businesses named "Mc-Anything", is because McDonald's has been so aggressive and successful at suing anybody who tries to, even when the business in question has nothing to do with food. Wal-Mart has taken on this role of late, going after all the "-Mart"s of the world.

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*** Many of these cases are in actual fact not because McDonald's or Wal-Mart are trying to be deliberate [[jerkass]]es, but because American trademark law demands that ''every'' infringement the IP holder is aware of ~~MUST~~ be defended against or they can be ruled to have abandoned the trademark when a major infringement case appears (such as the one directly below). This is why Xerox and Coca-Cola have been very careful to wage campaigns against using their product names as generics.

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** At least ~~once~~ famous case of McDonald's being [[Tropes Are Not Bad|clearly in the right]] was the early ~~1990's~~, was when they sued a South African businessman who was opening hundreds of fake McDonald's restaurants, complete with Big Macs.

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* The Bratz doll line was stopped in its tracks by a 2005 court case that found that the concept was created while its creator was still at Mattel, before making a comeback in 2010, although by that time, their popularity had waned (plus, the new dolls are a bit more conservative). This also had a more permanent knock-on effect for the [[Animated Series]].

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* ''[[Bionicle]]'' was prevented from using certain character names due to threats of legal action from Maori activists, since many of the names were taken from the Maori language. Lego managed to avoid getting completely screwed/sued by altering the spelling of the names.

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** It wasn't so much the usage that was the problem, more that Lego wanted to ''copyright'' ancient cultural terms.

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* In the 1970's, Tactical Studies Rules Inc. narrowly avoided a lawsuit from Chaosium when they tried to incorporate the [[Cthulhu Mythos]] into the nascent [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Chaosium, who had been sold the right to produce Lovecraft-related board games by copyright holder Arkham House, stipulated that TSR could keep the content if they credited Chaosium's "Call of Cthulhu" series. TSR backed down and [[What Could Have Been|removed the content instead]].

== Toys ==

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* The ''Bratz'' doll line was stopped in its tracks by a 2005 court case that found that the concept was created while its creator was still at Mattel, before making a comeback in 2010, although by that time, their popularity had waned (plus, the new dolls are a bit more conservative). This also had a more permanent knock-on effect for the [[Animated Series]].

⚫

* ''[[Bionicle]]'' was prevented from using certain character names due to threats of legal action from Maori activists, since many of the names were taken from the Maori language. Lego managed to avoid getting completely screwed/sued by altering the spelling of the names.

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** It wasn't so much the usage that was the problem, more that Lego wanted to ''copyright'' ancient cultural terms.

== Video Games ==

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* [[Channel 101]] had to cancel ''House of Cosbys'' because of a cease and desist from [[Bill Cosby]]'s attorney.

* ''Moshi Monsters'' had to take down its character Lady Goo Goo and her music video "The Moshi Dance" and scrap the next planned music video "Peppy-razzi" after Lady Gaga's lawyers won a law suit against them claiming people would get confused and think the character was endorsed by her.

== Western Animation ==

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* The rights to ''[[Transformers: Robots in Disguise]]'' were sold to Disney as part of a [[Saban Entertainment]] package deal,<ref>Disney wanted to buy the rights to ''[[Digimon]]'', but couldn't buy it separately. The only way they could get their hands on it was to buy ''all'' of Saban's shows as a package. This would be the same deal that landed them ''[[Power Rangers]]'' for a while, which [[They Just Didn't Care]] about enough to properly supervise the creative team for.</ref> thus making it unlikely to ever see DVD release, since Disney couldn't care less about ''[[Transformers]]'' to rerelease it and Saban couldn't care less about ''Transformers'' to buy the show's rights back from Disney as they did with much of their live-action input.

* Music rights were the reason behind the long wait for ''[[Daria]]'' on DVD; being a MTV produced show, they ([[Network Decay|ironically]]) used snipets of new music constantly, often using ten or more just one episode. Even just lasting seconds long, it led to a mind-boggling amount of rights to shuffle through. Eventually, they decided it was either clear all the rights, and pricing ''Daria'' out of the market altogether, or re-produce music that sounds good enough to pass for whatever mood they were going for.

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== Other ==

⚫

* Some years ago a British food company produced a brand of chips [fries] called Stringfellows, which had to be withdrawn when nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow objected to the name.

⚫

* [[McDonald's|McDonald's Corp.]] tried to force a Scottish fine dining establishment named McDonald's to close or change its name despite the latter being in business for over a century. The fast food chain lost the case. It helped that the Scottish restaurant was run by a high member of Clan McDonald.

⚫

** McDonald's Corp. also attempted this in Malaysia, except that the dining establishment in question was a small Indian-Muslim restaurant whose only offense is that its name vaguely resembled McDonald's. The fast food chain lost that case, too.

⚫

** One of the cases they did win was to convince a San Francisco coffeeshop to change its name from McCoffee, whose name was a [[Incredibly Lame Pun|pun]] on the name of the owner Elizabeth McCaughey, a good ''decade'' before they got into the coffee business themselves. These and many other examples can be found at [[The Other Wiki]].

⚫

*** The reason that it's not particularly common to see parodies that use fast-food chains named "Mc-anything", or real-life businesses named "Mc-Anything", is because McDonald's has been so aggressive and successful at suing anybody who tries to, even when the business in question has nothing to do with food. Wal-Mart has taken on this role of late{{when}}, going after all the "-Mart"s of the world.

⚫

*** Many of these cases are in actual fact not because McDonald's or Wal-Mart are trying to be deliberate [[jerkass]]es, but because American trademark law demands that ''every'' infringement the IP holder is aware of ''must'' be defended against or they can be ruled to have abandoned the trademark when a major infringement case appears (such as the one directly below). This is why Xerox and Coca-Cola have been very careful to wage campaigns against using their product names as generics.

⚫

** At least one famous case of McDonald's being [[Tropes Are Not Bad|clearly in the right]] was the early 1990s, was when they sued a South African businessman who was opening hundreds of fake McDonald's restaurants, complete with Big Macs.