Ah, those creative litigators
Published 2:52 pm Monday, October 4, 2010
It’s reassuring to know that in good times and bad, Americans love their lawsuits, big and small:
n A California company, A Hundred Monkeys, is suing a Wisconsin company, 100 Monkeys, for trademark infringement.
Because the names sound similar and the companies are direct competitors, “customers and potential customers are likely to be confused into believing” the companies are related, the California company alleges in a lawsuit.
Direct competitors? One specializes in public relations and social media (100 Monkeys) in Wisconsin and the other helps clients come up with company names (A Hundred Monkeys) in California. So, they aren’t even indirect competitors.
Keep this up, and 100 real monkeys will rightly sue for character defamation, and force the company to change its name to A Hundred Humans.
n A gambler sued to recover $675,000 in losses from a Detroit casino. His lawyer tried to use a 19th-century Michigan law that allows people to recover gambling losses. The judge threw out the suit, saying the law applied to illegal gambling, not legal gaming. The suit said the casino had a duty to stop the man from accumulating losses for nearly a decade. His lawyer, Frank Cusumano Jr., says he’s considering an appeal. Of course.
Cusumano plans to use the “Lost in America” defense, based on the 1985 movie starring Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty in which Hagerty’s character loses the couple’s retirement “nest egg” in a single night in Las Vegas. Brooks’ character, David Howard, an ad man, tries to convince the casino to give the money back.
David Howard: “As the boldest experiment in advertising history, you give us our money back.”
Desert Inn Casino Manager: “I beg your pardon.”
Or perhaps in the boldest experiment in legal history, Cusumano will advise his client to cut his losses.
n In September, a little outfit called McDonald’s lost an eight-year battle to stop a family-run Kuala Lumpur restaurant from calling itself McCurry, after Malaysia’s top court said the Indian-food joint could use the prefix “Mc” in its name.
A McCurry lawyer said the ruling means McDonald’s doesn’t have a monopoly on the prefix “Mc.”
Surely McCurry was selling Big McCurry McFlurrys, or something, to trigger such a suit. Well, not quite. Reports say McCurry serves authentic South Indian cuisine such as fish head, mutton and chicken curries. It also serves Malaysian food such as thosai, chapati, roti canai and nasi lemak.
McDonald’s has 32,000 restaurants worldwide, with 185 in Malaysia. It has annual sales of $70.6 billion.
Mayor McCheese would be McShamed.
