How To Give Yourself A Black Eye
If you, as a person, want to give yourself a black eye, it's fairly easy. Punch yourself in the eye or run - eye first - into a door. If you're a multinational corporation, it's even easier! Hire a lawyer! Then have the lawyer sue a tiny pub in Britain for using two words to advertise its Christmas dinner special. Yep, KFC hired a lawyer to go after a tiny, little pub for using the words "Family Feast" to describe a special they run for Christmas dinner.
The highest pub in England has come out on top in a David-and-Goliath battle with Kentucky Fried Chicken over the right to call one of their meals a "family feast".
Every Christmas, the remote Tan Hill Inn in the Yorkshire Dales serves a traditional meal of turkey with all the trimmings for £40 a head.
However, American fast food giant KFC threatened legal action against the quirky local for trademark infringement of the chain's own "Family Feast" - a mass-produced carton of 10 chicken pieces, chips, coleslaw, potato with gravy, and 1.25 litre soft drink.
When pub landlady Tracy Daly, 42, received a letter from Freshfields law firm on London, on behalf of KFC, she initially thought it was a late April Fool's joke. Even the solicitor's name, Giles Pratt, sounded suspicious, she said.
But she called him, and heard it was serious. "The solicitor told me I shouldn't take it personally, but I don't feel anything - it's just hilarious," she told The Times newspaper.
My goodness, the Colonel would be so very, very pleased with the decision to try to enforce a trademark on two very, very common words in the English language against such an insignificant victim. Absolutely brilliant corporate maneuver, KFC. You've just made yourselves look completely and utterly foolish and probably done more damage to your precious trademark all by yourself than that tiny little pub could have ever done. From now on, people will giggle when they see family feast and remember family farce.
UPDATE: Sorry, I left this out. Here's the menu for the Tan Hill Inn's Family Feast:
…..soup or Guinness and Stilton pate, followed by roast turkey with Yorkshire puddings, cranberry sauce and vegetables. Punters can choose between Christmas pudding and Strawberry Gateaux for dessert, with coffee or cheese and biscuits to finish.
As opposed to:
….a mass-produced carton of 10 chicken pieces, chips, coleslaw, potato with gravy, and 1.25 litre soft drink.
Hmmm. Which sounds more appetizing? We begin to see the problem……
World news | Gaius Thursday, 10 May , 2007
By Granddaddy Long Legs, Friday, 11 May , 2007 @ 8:59 am
These letters are very routine. It costs nothing to send out a threat, and it probably works 95% of the time. But all you have to do is write back that you don’t believe you’ve infringed on their copyright and they’ll usually let it go.