CBS vs 48 Hour Magazine: Team Goliath
[This post has been updated to change one slight factual error and one typo mentioned in a 48 Hour Magazine editor’s rebuttal. The rest remains the same, though I would like to clarify that I wasn’t thinking specifically of these folks, at all, when I said “lazy assholes” - the kind of thing I was describing happens every day and in many contexts, possibly even one that I’m annoyed about right now that has absolutely nothing to do with this.]
I can’t believe how much I’m on CBS’s side of the 48 Hour Magazine debacle, but I really, really am. Here’s why:
1. This isn’t like when the US Postal Service sued the band The Postal Service. Nobody was going to get confused and try to mail a letter by putting it in a CD case. 48 Hours is a *newsmagazine* show that’s been on TV for decades and airs once a week. When I first heard of 48 Hour Magazine, I assumed immediately that it had something to do with CBS’s 48 Hours show.
2. CBS’s “demands” are totally reasonable! They don’t want money or anything, they just want the magazine to change it’s name to something else and give them the “48hoursmag” URL, and since they are agreeing (QUITE SWEETLY) to forward that domain to the magazine’s new one for a period of time for continuity, they want to know what the name is going to be first before they do it. This is beyond reasonable: they shouldn’t have to forward it to, say, “CBSsucks.com.”
3. The 48 Hour Magazine people were indignant and underminery about this from the beginning, claiming (despite working in media) to have never heard of to not be aware of the continuous airing of 48 Hours the long-running weekly prime time network TV show. Even if this is true (and it really can’t be, but even if it is), it is the responsibility of the creator of a new thing to GOOGLE THAT THING and see if it’s already a thing before making a venture out of it! I have been burned by this, but much more often I’ve been the person who thought she had a great name/concept for something, Googled it, saw that someone else was doing it, and took the time to think of a new one because she’s not a lazy asshole.
4. It doesn’t matter if the magazine is the “little guy” and CBS is “the big guy” here. CBS has every right to protect their intellectual property in this pretty clear-cut case, and they are being so extra-cool about it so far that it’s pretty admirable. The “little guy” here is coming off as inflexible, whiny, and unable to admit what is pretty obviously a huge lapse on their part.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone cares, but I just can’t put myself in the place of someone who would start an entire magazine without checking to see if the name was not totally famous already. They should actually be pretty embarrassed about that, not indignant and defensive.
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