UK — A sexually charged parody of Apple Computer Inc.’s distinctive iPod ad campaign has the company’s attorneys crying foul.According to the website for the iBuzz “musical vibrator” (www.ibuzz.co.uk/) Love Labs, the company behind the iBuzz, recently received a letter from Field Fisher Waterhouse, LLP, a law firm representing Apple, taking issue with specific images used by Love Labs in promoting the iBuzz.
In the letter, the partial text of which was posted to the iBuzz website, Apple’s legal representation states “Our client owns the copyright in all the images used in its ‘Silhouette’ advertising campaign and actively polices its rights in order to protect itself and its consumers.”
“Certain images used on your website (www.ibuzz.co.uk) may have been copied or substantially copied from those in which our client owns the copyright, without our client’s consent,” the letter continues, according to iBuzz. “Your use of such images amounts to copyright infringement.”
The letter goes on to assert that Apple would is “entitled to issue court proceedings against you seeking an injunction to prevent any further infringement of their rights and an award of damages or an account of profits and costs,” according to the information posted on ibuzz.co.uk.
The author of the post on the iBuzz website states that he is a partner in Love Labs but does not identify himself by name. The post author acknowledges that Apple’s claim is a “serious allegation,” and concedes that the prospect of being sued by Apple is “scary stuff.”
The author also opines that should Apple proceed with legal action, the company could face an uphill climb.
“The only fly in their argument is that we know exactly where the silhouettes in the iBuzz animation came from,” he writes, “and they certainly didn’t come from Apple.”
The unidentified iBuzz partner states that a friend created the images in question and “he’s still got the PhotoShop files to prove it.”
A demonstration of how the silhouette images were created is included on the iBuzz website, showing how the artist in question transformed a standard softcore porn image into a black iPod-style silhouette and animation.
On its site, iBuzz concedes that there is “arguably a similarity of style between the iBuzz animation and Apple’s,” but asserts that it is “settled law that copyright does not subsist in mere style or technique,” according to iBuzz’s legal counsel.
Thus, says the author of the post on the iBuzz website “we think the allegation is unfounded.”
The unidentified iBuzz partner jokes that “perhaps FFW knows something about the extent of Apple’s activities that we don’t.”
“Maybe Steve Jobs has identified the iBuzz silhouettes as coming from a vast Apple-owned library of pornography?” the author jests.
More likely, the iBuzz partner opines, Apple is “belatedly getting round to some poe-faced tut-tutting” as part of Apple’s new “clean-up mission.”
“Apple is getting fed up with companies linking their sex toys to the iPod, even though iPod users are quite happy to do it themselves,” the iBuzz partner observes.
The question may be moot, as the letter from Field Fisher Waterhouse also indicates that their client “remains hopeful that this matter can be resolved quickly and amicably.”
On top of Apple’s desire to resolve the problem without a court battle, the unnamed iBuzz representative states in his post that the company was planning to re-launch their website, anyway, even before the threat of legal action surfaced.
“But it seems a shame to lose it for all time,” concludes the iBuzz partner in his post. “Maybe somebody could archive it on YouTube? It would be fun to see how inflexible Apple got with Google…”
