Seems Portland City Hall’s plan to sue Pabst for copyright infringement—on account of how closely its unicorn-bedecked Project Pabst logo resembled the city’s famed “Portland, Oregon” sign—has gone flat for the time being.
After the city attorney’s office sent word it wanted to pull a resolution on the current city council agenda authorizing the lawsuit, to let settlement negotiations continue, the council this morning followed suit in an almost-perfunctory unanimous vote. Almost perfunctory, because Commissioner Steve Novick and Mayor Charlie Hales couldn’t resist cracking wise.
“I’m relieved,” Novick said, mostly because he hoped negotiations with Pabst would lead to an agreement without the acrimony of a court fight, but also because he feared upsetting “the ghost of Dennis Hopper.”
“I thought you were going to talk about a ‘blue ribbon’ committee,” Hales said. (Hales’ spokesman, Dana Haynes, for the record, said in a message this week that he made the same pun as his boss and was told, presumably jokingly, by the city attorney’s office to never say it again.)
Documents from the city attorney’s office, first posted Friday, offer some hints as to why the city wanted to sue: Money, among a handful of reasons.
The Oregonian last night quoted Hales’ spokesman as saying that the lawsuit could reappear in a couple of weeks, January 28.
It’s not really about money, it’s about protecting IP. Whether it’s a good policy or not, there’s a “use it or lose it” legal mentality to protecting trademarks. The City likely believes that if it allows a mild infringement today, a future less-desirable appropriator will throw such past knowledge/permissiveness (possibly successfully) back in the City’s face.
Does anyone even offer attribution of the original artist or for White Stag? The Mayor and City Attorney are primary infringes. The more we see of Charlie Hales, the more despicable he’s revealed to be.