A couple of good Supreme Court decisions today

[thewayne]

Of course the big news is someone got indicted on a few counts of mishandling documents, but that's hardly worth talking about when we can discuss dog chew toys and nursing homes!

Jack Daniels sued a toy maker that makes parody dog chew toys, including one that largely duplicated the appearance of the very famous Jack Daniels' whiskey bottle, calling it Bad Spaniels. Jack Daniels makes lots of merchandise and claimed that the toy diminished their brand. A lower court ruled in favor of the toy maker, claiming that it was their First Amendment right under protected parody ruling. The Supreme Court, in a surprisingly unanimous ruling, said 'Nuh uh!' and overturned the lower court, citing Aqua's Barbie Girl song. I'm not kidding. Barbie Girl was quoted IN COURT.

The nursing home ruling is really good! The family of a patient sued the nursing home that a husband was in, saying that they doped him up on psychotropics, making him unable to walk or feed himself, then tried to transfer him to a state facility. The home claimed that the family couldn't sue to enforce his rights, the court ruled 7-2 'Uh-huh, they can', with - guess who? - Thomas and Alito dissenting. It's the last few paragraphs of the Jack Daniels article.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1181012952/supreme-court-jack-daniels-decision

Comments

[moxie_man]

I will not celebrate the indictment, which hasn't officially occurred yet (not until Tuesday it's looking like), until I can change "THEY LOCKED HIM UP!"

And there was a third surprise decision today. SCOTUS upheld what is left of the Voting Rights Act declaring Alabama's congressional (gerrymandered) redistricting unconstitutional/illegal.

[thewayne]

That was definitely a biggie!

[kaishin108]

Thomas and Alito, grrr.
Kavanaugh has pleasantly surprised me a few times.

I think the ruling against that toymaker is valid, imho.

And great about the nursing home ruling!

Yes, the other big news that will probably get him elected. Then he can serve from prison, lol. (At this point that would not surprise me.)

[disneydream06]

Big surprise they sided with Big Business Jack Daniels.
So does that mean Parody is dead in the States of America? :o

Other then those Two Idiots, gotta wonder if the court is looking out for themselves for when their time comes. :p
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Parody is a tricky thing.  For example, Weird Al.  He goes to great effort to get permission before he makes his songs, from the people who did the original.  Now, the dog toy company, they were also conducting copyright infringement by making things very close in appearance to the heavily copyrighted Jack Daniels bottle.  And JD had repeatedly told them to knock it off.  It's also entirely possible that JD is getting ready to launch their own line of pet toys and didn't want a parody vendor to be diminishing their market share.

[disneydream06]

I bet if JD wasn't going to make toys before they are now. :o

[silveradept]

It's an interesting decision to let the trial proceed in the trademark and parody case. From not remembering all that well, I think parody protects against copyright claims, so whether it protects against trademark claims is possibly untested ground at this point? Although, if that's the case, then we have to worry about how close to the original a parody is allowed to get before someone can hit them with trademark claims.