Battle of the Footlongs!

Amid civil war in the Mid East, natural disasters in Japan, and political turmoil in Wisconsin we have the battle of the bread taking place in the U.S. District Court in Des Moines, Iowa.

With bombs bursting in air, tsunamis soaking the coastline, and politicians holding walkouts, how can something as simple as the word footlong cause such a commotion for the courts?

Well, truth is it isn’t about the word itself, it’s about trademark infraction.  Subway, it seems, thinks that they own the rights to the word footlong, from its seeming never-ending five-dollar footlong campaign, complete with campaign theme song. I know you’ve heard it, so I will save you the necessity of hearing me sing it.  It just boggles the mind that people would think that way about something so obviously part of the English language.

It reminds me of a situation that Groucho Marx found himself in when Warner Brothers tried to sue him for calling one of his movies “A Night in Casablanca.”  Of course, Warner Brothers studios complained that they owned the rights to the name Casablanca from the movie they released five years earlier.  Just after the Marx Brother’s started shooting their comedy, the Warner Brothers legal team threatened a law suit.  The letter prompted Groucho to respond in his own special way.  Here’s his opening salvo, I mean paragraph:

“Dear Warner Brothers,

Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.“

As if that wasn’t enough, Groucho goes on to suggest other things that Warner Brothers might stake claim to, since they obviously want to own everything.  He asks if they also lay trademark rights to their name Warner Brothers, and then quickly adds that they probably have a right to the Warner name, but what about Brothers?  He baits the legal team by suggesting that there is a long line of brothers who probably have a better claim to the term than they do, not including the Marx Brothers themselves, who predate the Warner studios by decades.  Groucho suggests that the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” all have rights to the name Brothers that predates any such rights that the Warners might have.

He extends his harassment to Jack and Harry Warners’ first names.  Groucho suggests two Jack’s have the rights to the name Jack, citing the children’s story “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and Jack the Ripper.  He nails Harry with Lighthorse Harry Lee, and someone whose name he pulled from a New York phone book, Harry Applebaum.

Apparently, Groucho made his point with his letter, as he never received another from Warner Brothers about using the name Casablanca, nor Brothers for that matter.  The absurdity of such lawsuits knows no bounds it would seem, and we end up battling over stupid things like the term footlong.  Don’t we have better things to do with our time and our money than to waste it on frivolous lawsuits like this?