Intellectual Property Fun: Is Comedy Central Claiming It Owns The Character Stephen Colbert?

from the stephen-colbert-stephen-colbert-stephen-colbert dept

For years, when Stephen Colbert was on Comedy Central, he actually would discuss intellectual property issues with surprising frequency, including taking on SOPA back when it was a thing. Perhaps this is because he has a brother who is an intellectual property lawyer (who apparently works for the Olympics, which is not very encouraging). So it's interesting to see that Colbert is now claiming that a lawyer from Comedy Central or Viacom (he's not entirely clear) has contacted CBS to say that it holds the rights to the "character" of Stephen Colbert.

If you're not at all familiar with Colbert, this will take some unpacking. For many years, Colbert hosted a TV show on Comedy Central (owned by Viacom) called The Colbert Report, in which he played a pompous/clueless TV news blowhard... also named Stephen Colbert. A big part of the conceit was that this was a character, quite different than the actual Stephen Colbert in real life. More recently, Colbert ended that show, to move to network TV to take over David Letterman's old slot, where it's now the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Importantly, on the Late Show, Colbert insisted that he was leaving "the character" of Stephen Colbert behind and would actually be himself, Stephen Colbert. Got that?

In the last few months, however, there have been some concerns that this new network non-character Colbert wasn't performing well in the ratings -- and part of the blame placed on that was the fact that he was no longer using the character of Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report.

“Late Show” has had trouble finding the funny. That’s not surprising, given how reliant his Comedy Central show was on the character he played: a smug, self-absorbed conservative talk host. That character is gone now, and now the hunt is on for what works with the “real Stephen.” Some of the standing bits toss off some good one-liners, including a fake confessional booth where Colbert admits to nonsensical sins. But too many set-ups fall flat. The “cold open” at the start of the show could develop into a keeper but at the moment it feels forced and ends abruptly, rather than naturally flowing into the title sequence.

Perhaps because of this, and as an attempt to boost ratings, last week at the Republican Convention, Colbert did two things -- he brought Jon Stewart on to return to the main desk to do a story on Donald Trump... and he brought back the Stephen Colbert character: Except... according to (not a character... we think...) Colbert, some bigwig lawyer, at Viacom or Comedy Central has called up the lawyers at CBS to say they can't do that any more. I'm almost surprised that Colbert didn't have his brother on to talk about this, but perhaps his brother is busy sending nastygrams to companies telling them they can't tweet about the Olympics. Either way, Colbert's "solution" to this issue is to say that the character of Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report will no longer appear on his show... but instead, there will be a character named Stephen Colbert who is the other (character) Stephen Colbert's "identical twin cousin." You can see it all in the video above, which also concludes with Colbert bringing back one of his popular Colbert Report segments "The Word," which is now rebranded as "The Werd."

Of course, with Colbert, it's never entirely clear how much of what he says is serious or not, so it's possible that this is all a ploy to boost the ratings. However, usually when he does these things, they're at least based on a kernel of truth. And, if that's the case, it'll be interesting to see if the Viacom/Comedy Central lawyers take exception to this workaround. It would certainly be a fun lawsuit to see them arguing over which forms of Stephen Colbert Stephen Colbert can use...

Filed Under: characters, colbert report, intellectual property, late show, stephen colbert
Companies: cbs, comedy central, viacom

Dumb Starbucks Is Shut Down... For Reasons Entirely Unrelated To Questionable IP Usage

from the so-this-is-how-it-ends,-not-with-a-bang-but-with-a-bureaucrat dept

The Dumb Starbucks goes down, but for the least interesting reason possible. The sudden appearance of a coffee shop blatantly using Starbucks' trademarks (with the word "dumb" appended) and claiming something called "parody law" would save it raised several questions. First and foremost was: who the hell thinks they can get away with this?

Anyone wishing for Dumb Starbucks to be a test case for "parody law" will be severely disappointed. The Dumb Starbucks in Los Angeles was just shut down, but the non-Dumb Starbucks legal team had nothing to do with it.

The Los Angeles County Health Department shut down the Dumb Starbucks on Monday just as the man behind the faux coffee shop in the Los Feliz neighborhood revealed he was the host of a Comedy Central TV show.

The shop was closed for operating without a health permit, the department told the Los Angeles Times. A sign was posted on the front window of the store on Hillhurst Avenue on Monday evening, saying it was closed for violations.

The whole thing was simply a stunt for a Comedy Central show starring Nathan Fielder, who held a "tongue-in-cheek" press conference while wearing one of the famous (Dumb) green aprons. According to him, Comedy Central is only now aware of his promotional stunt.

The only people who could possibly have been seriously hoping Dumb Starbucks would act as a test case for fair use and parody would be those who would like to see fair use weakened. The store's "fact sheet," which "cited" fair use and "parody law," parked itself in the middle ground between ham-fisted and half-assed and gave every impression it was written by a copyright maximalist trying to be clever.

So, even if the abrupt end of the Dumb Starbucks franchise is rather anticlimactic, we can at least be grateful this publicity stunt didn't make its way through the court system, where it could have generated some bad precedent with its disingenuous take on fair use. For better or worse, Fielder stated at his faux press conference that he was thinking of opening up another store in Brooklyn, something Comedy Central might want to keep an eye on, considering comedy sometime relies very heavily on parody.

Filed Under: fair use, nathan fielder, parody, trademark
Companies: comedy central, starbucks