Criss Angel Sends Ridiculous Legal Threat After Comedian Creates Parody Menu Of His Restaurant
from the that's-not-magical,-that's-being-a-censorial-asshole dept
Harrison Greenbaum is a comedian and (sometimes) magician, who noticed that the magician Criss Angel had opened a restaurant, named "CABLP" and hadn't registered the domain cablprestaurant.com. For whatever reason, the restaurant's actual website appears to be Eatblp.com, and so Greenbaum registered cablprestaurant.com and created a very obvious parody menu. I mean:
It took me way longer than it should to figure out that CABLP apparently stands for Criss Angel's Breakfast, Lunch & Pizza. Either way, this just seems like a bunch of nonsense, except that Criss Angel apparently is spending some of his very large fortune on hiring an actual intellectual property lawyer named Thomas Carulli from the law firm of KMA Zuckert to send a very bogus cease and desist letter to Greenbaum.
So... Criss Angel has threatened to sue me over the VERY OBVIOUS parody I uploaded on Dec. 29th. His lawyers sent me a cease-and-desist letter (I uploaded it below if you're curious), but it's obvious to anyone that I have a First Amendment right to create comedy around… (1/5) pic.twitter.com/GffUKPY3qv
— Harrison Greenbaum (@harrisoncomedy) January 13, 2022
The letter is sillier than even I would have expected, claiming that the domain registration violates ICANN's policies.
Dear Mr. Greenbaum:
We are counsel to Criss Angel and his companies, including that which owns the CABLP Restaurant. In a social media posting you have publicly admitted that you intentionally are infringing our clients' trademarks and copyrights and are violating the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) policies with which you and your domain name Registrar must comply.
Specifically, you admit that you illegally registered cablprestaurant.com as your domain name:
Criss Angel opened a restaurant this year called Cablp and forgot to register CablpRestaurant.com. I know this because, yesterday, I became the proud owner of CablpRestaurant.com.
I mean, even the most cursory glance by a lawyer of the caliber (and billing rate) of Thomas G. Carulli would note that this is not an admission of intentional infringement or "illegal" (WTF?) registration, but rather fairly obvious commentary in the form of parody, which is widely protected. And, because Carulli apparently couldn't be bothered to pull up the long history of case law on this, it is well documented that domain names making use of trademarked terms to comment on the trademark holder are very much protected. There are a bunch of cases on this (and many, many, failed attempts to use the UDRP process at WIPO to take away such domains), but a key one is Taubman v. Webfeats which makes it clear that using a trademark in a domain name for the purpose of commentary is protected speech and not infringement, so long as there is no confusion (which there clearly would not be here):
We find that Mishkoff's use of Taubman's mark in the domain name "taubmansucks.com" is purely an exhibition of Free Speech, and the Lanham Act is not invoked. And although economic damage might be an intended effect of Mishkoff's expression, the First Amendment protects critical commentary when there is no confusion as to source, even when it involves the criticism of a business. Such use is not subject to scrutiny under the Lanham Act.
There are other cases along these lines as well, and you would think that a lawyer like Carulli could have maybe asked an associate to rack up some billing time looking these up? I mean, unless the purpose was to send a bogus threat letter hoping that Greenbaum would be scared and back down.
It gets dumber.
You further admitted to setting up on your website a menu that is substantially similar to the actual CABLP menu.
If you think the menu above is "substantially similar" to the actual menu at Angel's restaurant, you may want to have your reading comprehension abilities checked carefully, because they're broken.
There's more nonsense in the letter, but it's so bad it made me pause to wonder if this were all an elaborate prank by Angel and Greenbaum together to try to let people know that Angel had actually opened a stupidly named restaurant... but, that seems too low for even Criss Angel.
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Filed Under: criss angel, domain names, fair use, free speech, gripe sites, harrison greenbaum, parody, thomas carulli, trademark
Companies: cablp, kma zuckert
Reader Comments
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Criss Angel would do well to spend less time with his magic tricks and more time trying to conjure up a sense of humor.
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Re:
I'm afraid that's one trick Criss Angel may not be able to pull off.
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Maybe he could hire David Blaine to maybe bury the website in a block of ice or something.
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See also
https://www.clevescene.com/64-and-counting/archives/2010/12/22/absolutely-epic-1974-letter-from-clev eland-browns-to-a-fan
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Wow... just... rubs between his eyes
The downside of immortality is I remember when a lawyer who did something this stupid would be put in the stocks in the center of town and have rotten veggies thrown at them.
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Re:
That could still be arranged, if you like. I know a farmer...
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Not how copyright works
I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned. In the C&D:
That's...not how copyright works.
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Criss Angel's money disappears
If the website's menu is "substantially similar" to CABLP's menu is Mr. Carulli claiming that a reasonable person would believe that the actual Cinnamon Toast Crunch is, in fact, named after a stripper Criss banged in the 90's?
Gotta admit, Carulli makes a valid point.
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Not even Criss Angel can make the Streisand Effect disappear.
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Re:
If he were able to accomplish that somehow, it would certainly be better than any of his other tricks.
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Re:
This contest is over, give Norahc the $10,000 grand prize (I believe that's what happens when Techdirt awards you with comment of the week)!
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Maybe he could hire David Blaine to maybe bury the website in a block of ice or something.
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i guess we know who had the Special K.
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Your client is serving what at their restaurant now?
Parody site: Two raw eggs, cereal orders named after and served by strippers that can include drugs and/or human breast milk, pancakes bounced off the abs of a topless magician, a taco where the filling includes a women with a mustache and economic collapse...
Lawyers: The menu on the parody site is substantially similar to the actual CABLP menu.
Me: Uhhh...
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Re: Your client is serving what at their restaurant now?
I mean, let's face it - high markups on otherwise average or unpalatable food items is rife in the restaurant industry.
Realistically, the legal action gives me the impression that Criss Angel's team is angry they didn't think of the joke first.
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He just Streisanded himself. Thanks, never would have come across it if it weren't for this article!
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"Watch me make this money disappear!"
You're giving Criss too much credit, Mike - doing all this for publicity would actually be mildly clever, but if so it'd have to be Greenbaum's idea since "Criss Angel" and "clever" don't belong in the same sentence (unless they're connected by "is not").
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Say what you want: $100.99 for 500 pancakes with some kind of stripper show and a crane is a pretty good deal.
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