Re: American Apparel slams Woody Allen
Yeah. American Apparel is going to lose and deservedly so. 1) It has long been established that people - especially entertainers and sports figures - have a right to control the commercial exploitation of their own image. This holds regardless of any subjective estimate of what the "value" of that image is.
2) Their argument that Allens' personal conduct has trashed his image's value is novel but I can't see it holding up in court. It is, in fact, self-refuting. If Allen's image is so worthless, why are they using it to promote and sell their product? They can't have it ways - claim the image has no value, then derive value themselves from its use. They clearly expect to gain from using Allen in their advertising or they wouldn't do so. So
they place a value on it. I hope the judge openly laughs at the motion, then fines them for wasting the court's time.
Quote:
| settle reasonable or we'll make this super messy. |
That doesn't strike me as much of a threat. How much messier can they make it than Mia, the press and the late night talk shows already did when all this was still
news? Raking up old and well-known scandals is rarely a successful strategy, in or out of court, so unless they've got something new to attack him with, which seems unlikely (what's worse than what we already know about him? Genuine pedophillia? Beastiality? We'd have heard about anything like that long before now), this seems like an even worse strategy than claiming that the image they're commercially exploiting has no commercial value.
Regards,
Joe
