FeedsSam Adams, Registered Trademark
I'm a geek. (no, really? you say) As a geek, I find stupid and idiot attempts at restricting what I can and can't do in the realm of intellectual property patently (no pun intended) offensive. I also like current Commissioner Sam Adams, my former boss, who is running for mayor. And, hell, I even like Jack Bogdanski. It was because of these interests that I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I felt something terrible had happened and, as it turns out, it did. (hat-tip to bojack)
Basically, here's what happened. Mark and Dave, morning afternoon hosts at NewsRadio 1190 KEX, bought samadamsformayor.com and mayorsamadams.com so that horrible cyber squatters wouldn't get them. A few weeks after doing this, The Boston Beer Company, which owns Sam Adams beer, sent a cease and desist letter to them demanding that they take it down because of copyright infringement.
Uh, what?
I mean, I know that Portland is famous for its beer, and it could be construed that since our next mayor is named after has the same name as a beer brand that the Sam Adams beer might be confused for something worthwhile. I know that might hurt their image of (patriotic) fermented rat piss in a bottle. Sam did, after all, launch his campaign in a brewery.
Yes, this is a blatant abuse of the law. Yes, this is another reason why our current intellectual property laws are total bullshit.
Mark and Dave have a poll up asking whether they should cave or whether they should fight back. Join me in telling them to fight back, and then join me in drinking a lot of good beer tonight in defiance of this idiocy.
UPDATE: Check out our other posts on this topic. Boston Beer Company: Total Assholes and Sam Adams Boycott gaining momentum.
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Comments from site editors have a darker background than comments from everybody else.Wow. I'm going to withold my inner hatred and chalk it up to some lawyer at Sam Adams failing to do the (brief) reserach necessary to ascertain that there is in fact a Sam Adams running for mayor...
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James--
I know. It would have taken less time to do a quick search and see there is indeed a person running for mayor here named Sam Adams than it did to write, address, and send the letter.
I sure hope they fight it. There are valid uses for the laws that stop people from cybersquatting on a domain name. This isn't one of them.
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That's just absurd.
I may contain my hatred for Sam Adams and not change my drinking habits from very very little Sam Adams to none-at-all.
I guess the part that irritates me more is just this whole culture that makes it the standard practice for companies to have lawyers on retainer hunting this kind of stuff down, no matter how small, irrelevant, or ridiculous.
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This whole thing is absurd, and a waste of time and money...
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Write a letter and bitch them out. I did. Very cathartic
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Mark and Dave are AFTERNOON hosts (4 to 7 every weekday) - not morning hosts. Also, the letter didn't take weeks to get to them, rather it was a matter of a couple days...
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Thanks Teri! I've updated the post to reflect that they're actually afternoon hosts.
Regarding the weeks thing, I'm just going off of what they said.
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Incompetent corporate functionary picked on the wrong person. Like the mugger who decides to roll an off-duty Chicago cop. Dies instantly of lead posoning. This Boston Beer functionary did not do a reverse address lookup to find the address on the WHOIS matched that of the premises of KEX radio. Did not find that the Mr. Dave Anderson on the WHOIS lookup has a 50,000 watt AM radio transmitter at his disposal, along with a simulcast worldwide on the Internet.
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