While reading an article about T-Mobile Hot Spots at Starbucks, I ran into a thread about Starbuck’s evil behavior. While most of it was the typical rant you’d expect with a headline like “Don’t Patronize Starbucks,” I found a couple of interesting links. First, apparently an independent comic book author was sued by Starbucks for a parody of the Starbucks Logo. No cease-and-desist or anything… just BAM, lawsuit.

This all happened in 2000, so I’m sure it’s old news to some of you. Kieron Dwyer, the then defendent, wrote a piece a year later to offer some perspective. It’s an interesting story, and really quite unsettling. Kieron got shafted pretty hard in the end. Getting sued by a huge company has to be pretty lonely, too.

From the article:

And despite their verbal support, some friends and acquaintances could still be found slinking into a Starbucks for their afternoon latté. Many felt compelled to confess these “slips“ to me. Instead of absolution, I admonished them that every dollar they spent at the Evil Empire was a dollar spent on crushing me and my kind like so many overpriced coffee beans.

See, that’s the problem with the whole hero thing: no one takes it very seriously. Sure, everyone loves a heroic tale, but very few people want to actually take the hero’s journey. It’s a road fraught with peril. Unlike fairy tales, real life isn’t fair. Good people get hurt, and bad people win sometimes.

I also found this pretty interesting:

Despite Starbucks’ contentions and Judge Chesney’s opinions, I still believe it’s wrong to define the borders of free speech along commercial and noncommercial lines. In fact, one of the strongest precedents in First Amendment protection as it pertains to copyrights and trademarks is the case of 2 Live Crew. The band created a send-up of the Roy Orbison tune, “Oh! Pretty Woman,“ which contained sampled parts of the original song. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the band’s right to profit from the parody. And ask yourself why it was all right for a “fine“ artist like Andy Warhol to print countless lithos of Campbell’s tomato-soup cans or for Roy Lichtenstein to “borrow“ art from published, copyrighted works and reap huge financial rewards. The message seems to be that if your work is printed on canvas or paper, it’s art, but on cotton fabric (i.e., a T-shirt), it’s simply commercial. Just don’t tell that to all the museums and stationers who’ve sold millions of posters and greeting cards reproducing artists’ work. Free speech, it seems, isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Something to think about…