We had to laugh. From BusinessIdeas.net:
Winding up before a judge in court is never a good sign for your business . . . unless you’re in the legal profession. It can happen to anyone: the underdog, the top cat, the genius, the idiot, the slimy or the squeaky clean. Sometimes you can get sued just for being successful. Here are 10 business ideas (along with real life examples) across the spectrum of possibilities that can pretty much guarantee to land your ass in court.
This is quite possibly the biggest “duh” in the history of business, but even commercial giants fall prey to the trap. In an effort to capitalize on the success of Pixar, Disney thought it would be a novel idea to sell a lamp that looked just like the famous Luxo lamp that serves as the I in the Pixar logo. They copied the design of the Norwegian company’s lamp and even named it the Luxo, Jr.
As several items in this list will show, some of the most successful business ideas and entrepreneurs become instant targets for frivolous lawsuits. One of the surest ways to get sued is to come up with an idea with broad appeal and wild success—there’s only so much money to be gained from suing poor people.
Facebook and Twitter have both been sued in separate cases by business claiming to hold patents over the technology and procedures that make the social networks successful. The suit against Facebook is far flimsier than the one against Twitter, but the problem plaguing both defendants is the same: the world of patents is so overwhelmingly flooded, it’s virtually impossible to know if your entrepreneurial genius overlaps with someone else’s half-baked plans.
The lesson: as long as you do your due diligence and don’t steal anyone else’s ideas, you’re probably safe.
When someone makes it colossally big, there are always thousands of underlings who bathe in the excess fame and fortune trickling down. So when J. K. Rowling began selling millions upon millions of books (and raking in millions more in film and merchandising deals) there was plenty of attention to share between fan sites like The Leaky Cauldron. But after the final showdown between Harry Potter and He-Who Must Not Be Named hit bookshelves, She Who Must Not Be Plagiarized filed an injunction to stop The Leaky Cauldron authors from publishing a printed version of their site.
Ms. Rowling had no qualms about the extra promotion and anticipation drummed up by Potter-obsessed sites, but the book that served essentially as a Who’s Who in the Potterverse put a hex on Rowling’s patience. Her counter jinx attempting to block publication of the book, which she viewed as a “regurgitation” of her own work, ultimately won out as RDR Books revised the content drastically under the title, The Lexicon.
Be careful when you ride Ms. Rowling’s coattails (or that of any creative mind). If you come too close to stealing the whole coat, you might get turned into a newt.
One of the most indelible images of Obama’s ascent to the White House was, according to the Associated Press, a blatant example of copyright theft. The notorious lawsuits—the artist Shepard Fairey filed a preemptive suit of his own—raised an important legal issue in the age of Photoshop: what exactly constitutes fair use of an image?
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