Ags freely hand over moral high ground. Native American sale of Manhattan recalled.
UPDATE: Hours after publication the A&M Marketing office reversed their decision to send a letter to RivalWear.com. Apparently, Mike Huddleston reads this blog.
"The call was made late Wednesday night because the T-shirts did not meet the criteria necessary to pursue the letter. The shirts did not feature "University colors, an accurate depiction of Reveille as a mascot, and didn't contain any other identifying marks," Huddleston said."
In what is quickly devolving into a contest of which school can out-gay the other, A&M is threatening to sue a Longhorn t-shirt website, RivalWear, for it's t-shirt mocking/imitating Aggieland Outfitter's 'Saw 'em Off' shirt.
While Texas' case against Aggieland Outfitters is weak, atleast the logo being parodied is clearly identifiable as theirs. According to the article, A&M claims it has copyrighted the image of an American Collie wearing an A&M blanket...
- No where on the RivalWear collie silhouette is there anything that identifies A&M.
- The collie featured in the image isn't even wearing a blanket
- Why did we even copyright the image of an insane inbred collie to begin with?
5 comments:
if anything I would have thought that "Saw'em Off" was the phrase that they'd be suing over.
I understand protecting your copyright and all that but this is gay. As a Texas fan, I really don't care that an entrepreneur is selling clever shirts (on both sides). I think both schools should leave both businesses alone and not stick it to small business owners.
UT has enough money and I don't see them losing the rights to the longhorn logo because a small local business owner is using it. I guess I see this as a Texan and not a longhorn fan.
Leave small business alone for pete's sake.
I had seen the Ag version saw 'em off parody shirts before but I figured somebody had just made them in their garage and were selling them around campus or on texags.com. If that were the case I'd feel sorry for them but as an official business it's a little more hard to.
Second, is that really the only or even primary shirt design they have? Would it really put them on the street if they had to ditch the design? If so I think that's just a case of a couple getting burnt while playing with copyright fire. Lawyers are the ones who create copyrights and if you mess with copyrights you mess with lawyers, and if you mess with lawyers you get sued.
The Wizard of Odds had an interesting post about the "non-profit" status of some of these big time colleges after Alabama outbid the Miami Dolphins for Saban.
The fact that UT has a color, a logo of a steer head, and an image of the tower and A&M has their bag of copyrighted things such as the image of an American Collie with a blanket further illustrates this point.
After all the uproar of UT being heartless bastards following the last post. I hope to see some name calling and sh*t tossing. I feel completely justified at this juncture.
Brad:
Can you contact me directly? I want to discuss something with you.
The Wiz
dawizofodds (at) aol.com
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