Solidarity©

Wiffle™, Inc. sux to mess with [expurgated]'s Wiffle Sox. What whiffly wafflers. Let's get Mr. Whipple to squeeze their Charmin.®



Did I ever mention here that Soft Skull got a cease-and-desist letter from the Michael M*ore camp? It concerned the title of our new book edited by William Upski Wimsatt (of No More Prisons and Bomb the Suburbs fame). M*ore's people claimed that the title, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, infringed on the copyright to M*ore's St*pid White Men. Rich, coming from the author of D*de, Where's My C*untry, which sounds quite like a certain Ashton Cusher cinematic vehicle, and horrifyingly similar in nature to the F*x News "fair and balanced" bullsh*t.



We ignored the cease-and-desist request and published our book with that title anyway. Titles are not protected by basic copyright. (And in any case, ours was not even the same title and of course the phrase "stupid white men" was around long before M*oore used it). Though copyright holders do have the option of trademarking a title, and even fictional character names, this is rarely done. The Chicago Manual of Style citation on this reads: "Book titles are harder to protect as trademarks than journal or lecture titles, because of a judicial and administrative reluctance to give trademark protection to names that are used only once."



The really annoying part is that somebody is being paid upwards of $100/hr to draft those silly letters. Wiffle, Inc. is throwing money at a nonexistent problem. If they did decide to bring [expurgated] to court, which is extremely unlikely, they'd be laughed right outta there.