This content is protected Sherdog’s awesome April Fools’ joke - Fightlinker - MMA, UFC, and other funny fight crap Quote: Out of all the Aprils Fools’ Day jokes big and small, I think my favorite has to be from Crave and Sherdog.com! Look at what they sent us yesterday! As of the date of this letter, the homepage of Fightlinker.com has been styled “Shitdog” and designed to exactly resemble the homepage of Sherdog.com, all in violation of the Sherdog Marks. The mark SHITDOG is spelled and pronounced confusingly similarly to the mark SHERDOG. This confusion is compounded by the use of a dog logo that is virtually identical to the dog logo that is a part of the Sherdog Marks. Finally, the page layout and color scheme of Fightlinker.com is virtually identical to Sherdog.com. Taken in their totality, these and other features demonstrate clearly that Fightlinker.com was designed by you to intentionally trade on the goodwill of Sherdog.com by using marks that are confusingly similar to the Sherdog Marks. We put a decent amount of work into our Shitdog parody, but Sherdog took it several steps further: they PAID a lawyer to put together this prank! For them to put that much time and effort into this makes us here at Fightlinker feel truly appreciated - we pranked Sherdog good, and they pranked us right back in epic fashion. Well done! The basis of any good prank or parody is that you try to make the joke as realistic as possible, and Sherdog achieved this with a full 3 page letter from their legal counsel at Crave. We’ve already seen what one of these looks like before, and it appears pretty legitimate to the untrained eye. Fortunately for us, we have a pretty intimate understanding of the legal concepts known as fair use and parody so by the end of page one we realized that our leg was being pulled. Again, my hat is off to Sherdog for putting so much effort into this. I’m glad their lawyer had enough of a sense of humor to play along too. Most decent legal eagles would not be willing to attach their name to such a frivolous and baseless document - I mean what would happen if people actually thought this was real??? Oh, to see our original parody that Sherdog played off of so masterfully, click here More **** from Sherdog - Fightlinker - MMA, UFC, and other funny fight crap Quote: You don’t officially get harassed by lawyers until the letters come by, so this morning was an especially pleasant surprise to be reminded how humorless Sherdog really is. They want us to surrender any and all profit we made from the whole April Fools day joke. Sure, you can have it. How does one write a check for zero dollars again? I think in general what really peeves me is how big companies respond to being poked fun at. I don’t doubt that most of them consider parody as something that damages their brand, but they need to get over that ****. We live in a free society, and that means that if I want to laugh at someone, I have the right to do so. I don’t yet live in a future dystopia run by giant corporations that demand absolute loyalty…yet. If this kind of harassment is indicative of the response companies have to satire, then it goes to show just how far they are willing to go to protect their companies from any form of criticism or dissent. This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve been harassed by them, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. The US is a hotbed of litigiousness. You have more practicing lawyers in the Continental United States then all other countries combined. The only other thing you can boast about similarly is your defense budget. Stop sending us letters, Sherdog, and for **** sakes get a sense of humor. Sherdog tried to sue FightLinker over this Interesting to note the same bullyboy tactics the UFC uses is the same tactics Sherdog have used.
That's brilliant. For some reason the 'Tim Sylvia eat **** & die' bit had me rolling around laughing.
