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from the but-is-her-dress-yellow-or-black? dept.
A Fox News anchor is suing a US toy company, Hasbro, for more than $5m (£3.3m) over a toy hamster that she says resembles her and shares her name. Harris Faulkner said the company's portrayal of her as a plastic hamster "was demeaning and insulting". She filed a legal case saying the toy resembled her traditional professional appearance, including complexion, eye shape and eye make-up design. The toy is part of the company's popular Littlest Pet Shop collection. It was first introduced in 2014, according to legal documents (pdf) obtained by entertainment news website Deadline. The legal case, which was filed at a district court in New Jersey on Monday, said Hasbro had "wilfully and wrongfully appropriated Faulkner's unique and valuable name and distinctive persona for its own financial gain". It said Mrs Faulkner, who has been a Fox News anchor for 10 years, had never given the toy manufacturer permission to use her name or likeness and in January demanded they stop using the product. But three weeks later, it said, the doll was still available on the Hasbro website.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34133723
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Informative) by RedBear on Thursday September 03 2015, @09:55AM
This is a weird one. I would like to laugh and laugh about this as I laugh about everything Fox News anchors do professionally, but... the toy is actually named "Harris Faulkner". Strangely it doesn't show up in searches on Hasbro's toy store website, but it comes right up on Amazon by just searching for "Harris Faulkner". There it is, right on the package. Looking at the back of just that one package there are at least a couple dozen other related Littlest Pet Shop characters with mostly very made-up sounding names like "Sugar Sprinkles", "Gertrude Catterson" and "Ozzie Shellstein". Even the more mundane examples like "Zoe Trent" or "Ripley Davis" don't seem to correspond to any known public personages.
In that context it is difficult to defend the use of the real name of a public figure as anything less than a deliberate targeting of that person, for reasons unknown. Very strange indeed. Maybe someone in the design department was a fan and thought Ms. Faulkner would like having a toy named after her, and nobody in marketing thought to double-check whether it was a name of a well known person, but that's hardly an excuse. Changing even a single letter would have protected the company, but there seems to be no pattern of the other names being meant to parody anyone in particular.
The popular opinion of the courts seems to be that celebrities have fairly well-established rights to the commercial misuse of their names and likenesses, so it would seem at first glance to be a valid case. Legally speaking, anyway. I have a feeling the toy has already been pulled from Hasbro's site in preparation for renaming it. The third-party sellers on Amazon have it priced at $60+, maybe already trying to take advantage of the idea that it will soon be a rare collectors' item.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Non Sequor on Thursday September 03 2015, @10:53AM
An employee must have had a brain fart and used a name they had heard on TV and forgot that they had heard it rather than coming up with it themselves.
For TV shows, don't they have the legal department clear character names to protect against this? Even if the use of the name is defensible, it's generally preferable to not get sued in the first place.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:45PM
I'd think they'd still run the names through a search engine. The fallout if they accidentally had a toy named after an ax murder or something is worth the effort to make sure the name isn't associated with anything (bad or good).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:59PM
Pick a random given name + family name combination. Make sure it isn't offensive (e.g. Mike Hunt) or outright weird, or something that would sound alien to your target market (unless it has some intentional foreign ethnicity). Chances are—whatever you chose—someone with that name will be unhappy.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:16PM
The funny thing is, the name appears to have been successfully trademarked. So I presume no one at Hasbro legal OR the trademarking office heard of Google.
Or, I suppose, Ms. Faulkner is not a tenth as famous as she thinks she is, and when they Googled it her results didn't stand out from baby name lists and some kid named Harris writing a book report on "Absalom, Absalom!"
(Score: 3, Informative) by CirclesInSand on Friday September 04 2015, @01:07AM
Trademark only extends to the scope of the industry. Their legal department would only have to check if there were other toys with that name. They don't have to check if there are other people, airlines, flute manufacturers, or shoe makers.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Bogsnoticus on Friday September 04 2015, @04:51AM
Given how much of Faux News is a joke, and thus should be used for entertainment purposes only, I think the trademark would extend across to the toy.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.