Thursday, February 11 2010
Beer and Lawsuits
From the Faces of Evil file, look at these two little cherubs:
Make beer, not lawsuits. Weasels. If you've read my previous blogs you'll know I enjoy the occasional beer, and that Central City Brewing is my favorite brewery/pub/watering hole in the whole world. Not only were they voted best local brewpub by CAMRA BC, but also their IPA was voted best beer in BC! I've been friends with their brewer, Gary Lohin, for years, following him from brewery to brewery, usually demanding he make me more beer.
Two peas in a beer-soaked pod. Gary and me at the 2009 CAMRA festival With all this in mind, you can imagine how bummed out I was to find out that California's Bear Republic brewery is suing Central City over trademark infringement. If you're not familiar with Bear Republic, they're in wine country in California, and they make a wide variety of award-winning beers that are very tasty and innovative. I've enjoyed a lot of those beers in the past . . .
Their suit (download a pdf of it here) contends that Central City Red Racer IPA infringes upon their beers Red Rocket and Racer 5. Let's take a look, shall we?
Brown bottles versus a green can . . . how do they expect any reasonable person tell them apart? Mmmkay. I'm not an intellectual property lawyer. I can't negotiate the US court system. The only reason I even have an attorney is to defend myself from lawyers. But I know manure when I smell it.
- Brown bottles, green can. No possibility of mistake there.
- The word 'red' is a colour, and cannot be copyrighted
- Vavoom girl on bike vs. sketchy rocket vs. numeral 5. What?
- The fonts look similar between Racer 5 and Red Racer, but action fonts often do look similar. According to a friend who designs typefaces (yep, they pay people for that) the two fonts aren't alike in any meaningful way.
Bear's reasoning is specious and their suit is worthless. They should be ashamed of themselves, attacking another craft brewer when they should be uniting to attack the big evil brewers of the world. According to an inside source, when Central City called to try to work out the suit amicably the Norgrove's blew them off with the declaration, 'We're Americans. We litigate first."
Where I come from that's prima facie evidence of a strategic lawsuit. They know their case has no merit, but they're going to sue because it's expensive and difficult to defend against a legal broadside. More than that, however, it's a jerk move on multiple levels. Americans are no more or less litigious than any other society today--certainly the ancient Greeks were vastly more litigious in their time (boring archaeological fact: most ancient Greek documents are lawsuits, depositions or summons) and to use the presumed culture of litigiousness as a shield for bad behavior . . . well, that's just naughty.
But wait! There's more. According to District of Massachusetts IP Blog
Although there may be some similarities between the marks as used, there are differences as well, including distinct differences in the overall label / can designs. Another issue the plaintiff may have is that its federal registrations are not to RACER and RED ROCKET but rather to RACER 5 INDIA PALE ALE and BEAR REPUBLIC RICARDO’S RED ROCKET ALE.
So they don't even have Racer or Red Rocket registered! There's nothing there for them to claim damages against.
And late in the day Gary released a statement over at the Beer Advocate (link, but you have to be a member to view Gary's reply)
“Hi everyone, I’d like to clear up a couple of things from the Central City point of view. My name is Gary Lohin, and I am the Brewmaster at Central City Brewing Co, which is in a community just outside Vancouver, British Columbia. First of all, our logo is not a mish-mash of Racer 5 and Red Rocket. The logo was used with permission from a local elderly painter, who painted this oil painting in the 50’s. That’s why the girl kind of looks like a Vargas/pin-up girl. I don’t believe the painting had a name, but we dubbed it Red Racer after the bike. As for the font, we had it professionally designed by a local graphics artist. Any suggested similarities in the font and colours are purely coincidental. As well as a brewer for 20 years now, I am a huge mountain bike enthusiast. Putting a bike on the label was kind of my homage to the local mountain biking community.
I must say I am disappointed in the actions taken by Bear Republic because I really like to think that all us craft brewers, and the people who drink our beers, are one like- minded people. We all love good beer!. I myself enjoy Bear Republic’s beers, and the most ironic thing is that we were selling their beers in our brewpub store! We never had a problem confusing their label with ours.
I know everything I have said probably means nothing in a court-of- law, but we never even knew who Bear Republic were when we designed our label way back when. We here at CCBC are totally committed to making excellent, distinctive beers, and wanted to send some to the United States. We think our IPA stands up to any IPA brewed anywhere. We wanted you guys down south of the 49th parallel to try some. That still will happen, but possibly under a different name, not logo. We want to spend our money on new tanks, and kegs, and our employees, not give it to lawyers.
I see this as a lose – lose lawsuit , and I certainly wouldn’t like to see a boycott against Bear Republic. It would have been nice to get a phone call though.
Gary Lohin
Brewmaster
Central City Brewing”
Man, I feel sorry for Gary. Make good beer, put in your dues growing the industry and educating the public about it, and then some goofball thinks he can sue you, probably mainly because he's an insecure bed-wetter (purely speculation on my part, but it fits the profile). The sentiment of the beer cognoscenti seems to parallel my own: commentary is running better than 90% in favour of Central City in the forums, and more importantly, nearly 100% against Bear Republic. Don't know if that's going to influence them or not, but beer geeks are a prickly bunch, mightily attached to the concept of beer integrity.
Of course, there's always the chance that karma might come back to haunt a certain brewing company. Notice anything here?
Go Speed Racer! Go sue Bear Republic!For those who weren't raised on cheap, jerky Japanimation, that's the Mach 5, driven by one 'Speed Racer', recently made into an expensive, jerky movie. Holy pot-kettle colour discussion Batman, seems like they've got some 'splainin' to do. Me, I'm going to Central City to pick up a flat of IPA. I may not be able to help them out in the suit, but my liver is not going down without a fight.
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