Ian Fortey
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We've all heard the infamous story of the lady who sued McDonald's after getting burned by a cup of hot coffee, or the woman who found the chicken head in her McNuggets.
What does not get as much coverage is now many suits get filed in the other direction, as the fast food corporations prove they can think up far stupider reasons to sue than their customers can.
In 1990, two UK versions of hippies were handing out pamphlets on the streets the way hippies (and various cults) tend to. The pamphlets made wild accusations about how McDonald's sells unhealthy food and creates pollution.
McDonald's was not amused and filed a libel suit, which is good for them because a sequel to the pamphlet detailing how McDonald's burgers are made from goat scrotum and how the Hamburglar made a series of gloryhole videos called "Robble Gobble" was already in the planning stages.
The Result:
The case went to trial and pretty much became the biggest, most embarrassing thing it possibly could have been for McDonald's. The two hippies, an out-of-work mailman and a gardener, represented themselves and proceeded to fuck McDonald's six ways from Sunday for seven straight years.
They called 180 witnesses to back up the claims they had made in the pamphlet, and cost McDonald's millions in legal bills. In the end, the defendants had managed to prove three-fifths of their claims, but were found guilty of libel on the rest. However, that managed to prove McDonald's guilty on a number of counts and also made them look like epic assholes.
An appeal by the defendants went on to fuck McDonald's further and make them look even more like a faceless corporation of death bent on killing children with Happy Meals, to the point where McDonald's basically folded and said they would not seek to collect on the money owed.
Burger chain Carl's Jr. sued rival Jack in the Box over an ad campaign that implied Carl's Jr. made their burgers out of the tender meat of the anus.
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Carl's Jr. boasts that their burgers are made of "Angus" beef and Jack in the Box staked their entire campaign on the fact that "Angus" sort of sounds like "anus." Carl's Jr. sued on the grounds that people may be too retarded to know that Angus beef does not come from a cow's ass and they wanted to protect that loyal base of retarded customers from being led astray.
The Result:
In July 2007, a judge denied Carl's Jr. an injunction to stop the ads from running. A suit is still pending but obviously it's moot because if Carl's Jr. wins, Jack in the Box can't go back and erase the ads from the customers' memory.
By the way, Carl's Jr. provided survey evidence to show that 36 percent of people thought Angus meat came from cow ass, which begs the bigger question of why they sell Angus burgers at all if they acknowledge a third of people think that.
In 2005, band of questionable talent Slipknot sent a cease and desist order to Burger King, asking them to quit advertising their chicken fries via commercials featuring a band that was actually called Coq Roq. Slipknot felt Coq Roq was violating their rights by punking off their incredibly original image that no band had thought of before, not even back in the '70s when KISS did it.
Rather than ignoring them, Burger King responded by filing suit against Slipknot, requesting that a judge declare that Coq Roq was not a rip off of Slipknot. In an actual, legal filing, Burger King reps, presumably with a straight face, detailed how the band Coq Roq is made up of six people in chicken masks named Fowl Mouth, Kabuki, The Talisman, Free Range, Sub-Sonic and Firebird. Also, so the court wouldn't be totally unaware of the finer legal issues, they included lyrics of a Coq Roq song:
Raw desire is the fire I feed
Chicken Fries are what I need
See you standing like BK treat
Long and lean and just out of reach
It's not known if at this point, having read the term "Coq Roq" about a hundred times, the judge decided to abandon law as a profession.
The Result:
After some meetings, Burger King quietly agreed to drop the campaign (it wasn't exactly going over well with customers anyway, since they were using cock innuendo to sell chicken fingers). Meanwhile the whole thing couldn't have done wonders for Slipknot's image, since it's kind of hard to look at them the same way once you realize they're a group of wealthy men with a team of lawyers in their employ.
In 2004, Krispy Kreme, riding high on a curious wave of people treating their donuts as if they were made of cocaine and titties, decided to sue donut maker Entenmann's for copyright infringement. It seems Entenmann's had the balls to call their donuts "original glazed" and sell them in white boxes with blue dots on them, which looks exactly like the green and white Krispy Kreme packaging, when viewed from a distance by a color blind and illiterate person who isn't able to read "Entenmann's" on the label.
The Result:
In early 2005, millions of Krispy Kreme customers looked up and said, "Wait a second! These are just fucking donuts! What were we all worked up about?" The company's stock price collapsed and shareholders filed a lawsuit of their own.
Suddenly the vaguely similar Entenmann's box was the least of their problems and they quietly dropped the suit.
In 2002, Italian food critic Edoardo Raspelli went on a foul-mouthed tirade against McDonald's, going as far as to say that the ambiance at McDonald's was "mechanical" and that the bread was "poor." Vulgarities such as that could only come from a man who sits at the right hand of Satan, his ink well fed by the blood of innocents and the semen of Hitler.
McDonald's, probably after some intensive rounds of therapy and some veterinary-grade tranquilizers to calm themselves, did the only responsible thing they could in the face of this irresponsible attack: they filed a $25 million lawsuit for defamation.
Above: Artistic rendering of an Italian critic.
The Result:
The judge in the case suggested the two parties work it out on their own, apparently out of a baffling desire to not preside over a case where he and the jury are forced to try multiple delicious McDonald's sandwiches to prove they didn't taste "like cardboard" (as Raspelli also said).
Little progress has been reported in the suit since, but Raspelli wound up with a massive amount of free publicity since the suit became huge news in the Italian press. Of course during all of the coverage, his harsh criticisms were repeated over and over again for millions of readers and listeners.
Somewhere there are probably some McDonalds executives wishing they had just had the man quietly killed.
KFC only has so many words associated with their brand. Kentucky. Fried. Chicken. It's not entirely practical to sue a state, a method of cooking and a bird every time they pop up in the media, but if two of those things appear together, possibly with a bucket near by, you better believe KFC is taking someone to court.
The makers of the Kentucky Fried Horror Show found that out when KFC sent them a letter calling their movie "alarming, ghastly, disturbing, revolting and vile" which is impressive since it hadn't been filmed yet and KFC had no way to get a script.
However, they did see the promotional art, featuring a head in a red and white striped bucket. The Colonel wasn't going to stand for that kind of chicanery. He stands for the mass slaughter of chickens, not people.
The Result:
Indie filmmakers are known to put movies together on a budget of change found under couch cushions, filmed after they get back from their own jobs at KFC. What they are not known for is fighting major corporations in court.
Thus, the Kentucky Fried Horror Show became the Kentucky Horror Show and the red and white stripes were removed from the promotional artwork, thus making this movie about people in the south dismembered and possibly eaten by the Devil safe for families once again.
Hooters, in a move that had to make more than one legal expert crack some hilarious jokes about "handling evidence" filed suit in 2003 against Kerfs WingHouse Bar & Grill. Hooters sued for $4 million in lost profit because the Winghouse stole some valued trade secrets, such as having waitresses in shorts and tight t-shirts, something Hooters went back in time to invent in the Middle Ages or whenever it was that a bar owner first noticed dudes will pay for more food, beer or bags or horse shit if a woman in a tight shirt is selling it.
The Winghouse, which has 10 locations, was apparently confusing poor, boob-hungry patrons who were just wandering the streets aimlessly in the hopes of finding chicken wings and a glimpse of cotton-clad nipple under an A/C duct. Hooters just couldn't stand for it. Winghouse filed a counterclaim accusing Hooters of trying to use the legal system to crush the competition.
Above: The right to Bear-Boobs.
The Result:
The judge in the case gave the jury a directed order to basically find in favor of the Winghouse, which they did. The argument from the Winghouse was that they can't be stealing a trademark from Hooters because the clothes are functional and functional clothes can't be protected that way. In case you're wondering, the function has something to do with boners.
Hooters tried to appeal the decision and lost once again, proving the legal system will not stand for anyone trying to hold an illegal monopoly on reducing their wait staff to boobies that can serve drinks.
In 2001, Merriam-Webster added "McJob" to their dictionary, defining it as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement." The CEO of McDonald's rattled off a bitchy letter, oblivious to the fact people had been using McJob to mean exactly what the dictionary said it meant for well over a decade.
When simply whining like children didn't work, it was later stated in a veiled, sad threat that McJOBS is trademarked and is the name of the program McDonald's uses to train mentally and physically disabled employees. So they were apparently preparing a claim that the dictionary violated the trademark by including the term, demonstrating McDonalds' complete lack of understanding of what a dictionary is.
The Result:
For once, the McDonald's legal team showed some restraint and the lawsuit at the heart of their veiled threats never came to pass. Instead, McDonald's has gone on a publicity campaign to try to convince the whole world to stop acting like jobs at McDonald's aren't awesome.
They've also started a petition again the Oxford-English Dictionary, hoping to convince it to remove McJob and its similar definition ("an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects").
McDonald's claims that definition is false and has evidence that 90 percent of its employees believe they receive valuable training that will be of benefit for the future, not mentioning how many of them believe that because they have resigned themselves to working at McDonald's for the rest of their lives.
Above: Valuable Training.
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