Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/i-found-out-about-this-amusing.html
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'Murican Girl™
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Aww, she wants to see the manager and wants us to go back to where we came from.
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Their best approach would have been not to acknowledge it at all, if they felt their clientele (children) would find it frightening/offensive. This doll is not for sale, thus there is no real ‘market confusion’.
Also, it is very well done, and is literally a work of art. Now famous too.
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Well, the parody is using their logo and such. So its within the right for them to want it taken down.
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Sure, there are children who have American Girl dolls, but how many children buy them?
I think it’s possible they sell dolls to a large number of Karens.
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It’s a disturbing thought that somewhere, someday, businesses will cater to a “Karen market”.
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I wonder if Walmart has said anything yet?
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I didn’t know about this American girl thing. Anyway it’s better to use the Playmobil set, because there are a lot of “Karen” sets.
https://media.playmobil.com/i/playmobil/9850_product_detail/Ufficio
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Parody is fair use, it doesn’t require permission from the copyright holder.
“A parody is a work that ridicules another, usually well-known work, by imitating it in a comic way. Judges understand that, by its nature, parody demands some taking from the original work being parodied. Unlike other forms of fair use, a fairly extensive use of the original work is permitted in a parody in order to “conjure up” the original.”
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/#:~:text=Is%20Fair%20Use%3F-,What%20Is%20Fair%20Use%3F,permission%20from%20the%20copyright%20owner.
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Excellent point. Also, children should not be on Facebook, should they!
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The law doesn’t care what they want, thankfully. But lawyers can make it expensive to demonstrate this.
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It’s within your rights to want whatever you like. It’s not necessarily within your rights to get it. If wishes were horses, etc…
More seriously, I can imagine a situation where they are forced to go after this sort of parody in order to keep their trademark, even if they have no chance of winning.
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I got this knock-off “American Girl” doll for my kiddo. She’s a huge Harley Quinn reader. So much cheaper than the mall version, and just as good!
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If your business is to sell dolls representing slices of who we are, what little girls can grow up to become, then the ‘parody’ Karen doll gets into uncanny valley territory.
Would they put out a doll that sports a BLM shirt and is called “Socially Aware Susan” ? Or do they limit their production line to JOBS girls can have (nurses, generic lab-coat, biz suit) and not community-effort types (Rosie the Recycler, crisis-line councilor, so on).
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This is religion among trademark lawyers, but I read somewhere (forgive me) that it’s only weakly demonstrated in case law.
Perhaps it’s like plane crashes: loss of trademark registration to genericide or dilution or “use it or lose it” is such a terrifying way to die that it makes trademark holders irrational about the risks. So they engage in legal thuggery that tends, in the end, to embarass them.
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At the minimum they’ll send a C&D to show they noticed and cared.
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Where’s my Becky Build-A-Bear? 
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They identified and began targeting that market long ago (or at least began selling them disturbingly human targets)
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I understand this…but…as an artist I prefer people not use my designs or artwork without my permission…parody or otherwise. I am always going lean on the side of protecting your own IP over anything else. And while yes this means siding with the evil Disneys’ of the world…it also means trying to do better in protecting the rest of us that don’t have their means to protect our work.
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