According to video game fan blog Kotaku, the Entertainment Software Association threatened that it would take legal action against the fan site unless Kotaku takes down all links and images referring to a t-shirt allegedly infringing upon the ESA’s trademarked ratings system. Kotaku isn’t making or selling the t-shirt, which displays an image based on the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s “Rated E for Everyone” image but reads, “Your Mom: Rated E for Everyone.” Kotaku refused to take down its post about the shirt, explaining that its post is editorial content, not an advertisement as the ESA accuses.
Personally, I actually agree with the ESA’s concern that there is substantial risk that certain people could see this t-shirt and believe that it was condoned by what they believe is a corrupt and evil video game industry. After all, a decent amount of game sales and ratings regulation legislation has been proposed nationwide premised at least in part on fears that this industry cannot be trusted. Attacking a fan blog for content they weren’t paid by the shirt manufacturer to post, however, is not likely to endear the ESA to anyone. This is particularly ironic given how much mileage the ESA has gotten out the First Amendment in court lately.
Update: Game Politics has some more information on this issue, and notes that another video game fan site did indeed capitulate to the ESA’s demands. My guess is that Kotaku, which is part of the Gawker Media Network, has better lawyers (or lawyers of any sort at all, which most fan sites are unlikely to have).
Updated again to fix missing tag and a proofreading error.
Oh give me a freakin’ break. You can parody anything and not hurt it’s image too badly. “Got Milk?” female shirts, “Yes, there are Natural 20’s” female shirts. Yes, the examples I’m using are attractive in nature, but all the same- people can tell the difference between a parody of a business icon of sorts (like Calvin pissing on the logo of car-making competition or praying before a cross, even though he’s not religious), and when the thing is real, just like most kids are aware of what’s real and what’s fantasy. There is absolutely NO percieved danger of someone looking at the shirt and thinking the ESRB condones the message, and if someone DID, then they didn’t have a friggin’ sense of humor to begin with.
I guess I should qualify what I posted earlier. I definitely agree in principle that the shirt is a parodic work and should be protected as such. There are two issues with this, however.
First, as noted in the original post, I do think that there is a substantial number of ignorant people who might actually mistake this shirt as being produced by the video game industry. If people will accuse game manufacturers of consciously creating “murder simulators,” this wouldn’t really seem to be the industry’s biggest offense. If people believe that “[t]he video game industry is a dark, violent, satanic, sexually explicit place that is full of dangerous traps,” would a “your mom” joke seem too low for the ESA? I’m honestly not sure (in a legal sense) how much we need to consider the attitudes of severely uninformed individuals when calculating whether a shirt is likely to dilute a trademark, so I welcome someone who knows more about law to speak up on this one.
The second issue here is that t-shirts have often been held to a different legal standard from, say, cartoons – that of a commodity rather than an expressive medium. Kieron Dwyer’s parody of the Starbucks logo was protected as speech on the cover of a comic book, but not on the shirts he subsequently sold. In this instance, the “Corporate Whore” logo is far more modified from the original than the t-shirt here, which makes me wonder how T-Shirt Hell will fare.
Either way, the ESA’s Orwellian urge to bully fan sites into preventing bad PR is pretty underhanded. I don’t believe for a second they ever intended to take bloggers to court over this issue; they’re just trying to cover up all evidence of something they don’t like.