Exactly this. The poachers they are trying to stop are also paramilitary groups.
Why shouldn’t it? They’ve uncovered several stories with their investigative reporting.
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I knew they were no good when they made the World Wrestling Federation change their name. Boo, hiss! As if anybody could confuse The Iron Sheikh and Jake “The Snake” Roberts with wildlife!
Oh wait…
I think the dust up was probably unavoidable but it could certainly have been resolved a lot more amicably.
For a rabid charity, WWF was being fairly reasonable at the outset. Then the sports entertainers started taking the mickey.
I think it was one of those situations where the American company just couldn’t grasp that the rest of the world actually existed.
I mean obviously there are people out here in the howling wastes outside the US (someone must be buying all the Hulk Hogan lunchboxes after all) but it’s not as if they actually matter for any other purpose than to consume US products…
The WWF was a far bigger deal in the rest of the world than some minor US wrestling syndicate and was the first owner of the name/logo.
It takes a certain mindset to brand your domestic-only wrestling circuit the World Wrestling Federation and market it with the intials WWF without first checking (or if they checked, without caring) that there is a genuinely worldwide, incredibly well funded charity called the World Wildlife Fund which has been branding itself the WWF for many years.
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Endorsing torture or murder (whether state-sanctioned or paramilitary) is not a sustainable or ultimately useful deterrent. It may feed some people’s wrath, but it will not save endangered species.
Defensiveness in response to @SqualusAcanthias’s perfectly reasonable question is also counterproductive.
Greedy people pay desperate locals for poached animal parts. This is not complicated thing to grasp.
Some people are more interested in vengeance than effective solutions. It’s the same attitude that has led to the US becoming a brutal carceral state. Millions for torture but not one cent for addressing the underlying post-colonialist social issues.
Indeed. Most poachers are paid a pittance by the smugglers/dealers.
[narrator voice]
It doesn’t.
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Which tends to go along with and thrive in situations of ecconomic desperation.
But even “organized crime” doesn’t quite get it. A lot of said groups are rebel/warlord militias and terror groups. Poachers gonna poach but the root of the most serious problems are nested in the areas with the most political instability, government corruption and decentralization, and the most serious poverty.
You can’t really separate the incredible poverty from the criminal gangs and roving bands of machete wielding militants.
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“We have to fight dirty because the bad guys fight dirty” has been used to justify all kinds of human rights abuses and war crimes. I didn’t buy that line of reasoning to justify torture and extrajudicial killings in the so-called “War on Terror” and I don’t buy it in the fight against poaching.
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I don’t even think that’s the most disturbing thing here. Given that a good lot of the major poaching groups are paramilitary political groups. Should a fucking charity group be straight up fighting a war? This sounds an awful lot like conservationists becoming an additional faction in civil wars, border disputes, and sectarian fights.
To the extent that solutions to these conservation problems only come with added stability. This is just about the opposite of what you should be doing.
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It does have the ring of something Bruce Sterling might have put in a near future dystopia, then thought, ‘nah, that’s too crazy’ doesn’t it?
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See I don’t know if WWF is actually “fighting a war”. Seems like it’s the rangers, park police, etc. in these countries that are doing the dirty stuff. Yeah, the WWF could pull their funding because of their actions, but then they simply aren’t protecting wildlife at all.
I also find it funny how BB tagged this story “ecoterrorism” but doesn’t use any kind of terrorism-related tag when the same tactics are used by non-eurocentric groups.
There are rhinos in Nepal?!
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It doesn’t really matter, L0ki, in trademark law you can use the same name as another company if you’re in an entirely different business and aren’t using that other company’s name as a way of selling yourself. For example, we have Frye’s Electronics, a local electronics emporium, and Frye’s Supermarkets, a division of gigantic Safeway Corporation, and because they cannot be confused with each other, they’re allowed to both be called “Frye’s”. There was no way that WWF the wrestling organization could have ever been confused with WWF the wildlife organization, and the fact that the wildlife organization went after them tooth and claw showed me that the wildlife organization was made up of a buncha male sexual organs. And yes, the wrestling organization’s name was deliberate hyperbole – heck, American professional wrestling as a whole is deliberate hyperbole – but they changed it to WWE only because of the cost of the lawsuit causing them to accept a settlement with a poison pill that they didn’t notice, not because they would have lost if they’d kept fighting the original trademark lawsuit.
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Uhuh, thank you for that. Perhaps next you might like to teach your granny how to suck eggs…
You may think that. Both organisations disagreed. There were objections being made to each other’s registrations in various jurisdictions.
The issue, fairly obviously, was not that people might think the Wildlife charity was running wrestling entertainment. The concern was that people might think there was some connection or that the WWF endorsed the wrestling in some way. The WWF did allow all sorts of organisations to use their branding for fund raising purposes.
The Swiss court agreed:
We have been shown a translation of the reasoned judgment of Judge Rahm. We note the criticisms made by the Federation, that the judge was not given all the relevant information by the Fund, particularly as to the current negotiations. However, we find the judgment helpful in throwing some light on the issues, which would have been in the minds of the parties at the time. The judge based his decision on “indirect” risk of confusion:
“As far as the products of the respective parties are concerned, no danger of confusion is to be assumed. The overall impression created by the publications of the Plaintiffs and the Defendant is so different that the average purchaser wishing to buy a wrestling magazine will hardly mistake it for the WWF News, or vice versa. On the other hand, indirect risk of confusion does indeed prevail: owing to the high degree to which the Plaintiff’s mark WWF is well known, the public may well get the wrong impression that the Plaintiff is in some form associated with the World Wrestling Federation. Danger of confusion has thus been sufficiently proved in this case.”
The Fund’s case for “precautionary measures” relied on “prejudices which cannot easily be repaired” in the form of “destruction to reputation”, “weakening of the trade mark”, and “confusion… owing to the marks being mistaken for each other” The judge observed:
“It seems in fact probable that in the event of the continued marketing of the Defendant’s products the prejudices as claimed will indeed arise, and in particular, considerable damage to the Plaintiff’s reputation is to be expected which, as experience has shown, is very difficult to remedy. The Plaintiff has a genuine interest in not being identified with the ideals of the World Wrestling Federation, which are in blatant contrast to his own principles. As stated in the foregoing, the Defendant’s actions have given rise to a risk of confusion which likewise affects the good reputation enjoyed by the Plaintiff. Neither does he have to tolerate the ‘watering down’ of his trade mark…”
(taken from the 2002 appeal in the UK courts - which the charity won WWF & Anor v World Wrestling Federation Entertainment Inc [2002] EWCA Civ 196 (27th February, 2002))
The spats continued with the parties reaching an agreement in 1994. In that agreement, the wrestlers agreed not to use the initials WWF outside the US and subject to some fairly limited restrictions in the US. They could still use their logo.
They stuck to that agreement until about 1997 when they effectively ignored it completely.
Now granted, you can say that they shouldn’t have entered into the agreement, that they had no need to - but they did.
Having done so, they breached the agreement.
Contrary to what you state, the change to WWE came much later than the original trademark dispute(s) and was because they comprehensively lost the lawsuits about the breach of the agreement (which there was really no doubt about).
There was scope for argument about how much they’d have to pay the charity as a result of the breach but that they were in breach and would have to pay something was not in doubt.
But yes, the charity are not nice people. I don’t how the US works in that respect but UK charities are rabid. They take their perceived responsibilities to get in as much cash for their charitable purposes very seriously and if the wrestlers thought a bunch of fluffy animal lovers would roll over and go away - well, they found out otherwise.
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I knew the details you decided to inform us about, but did not include them because the point was that the wrestlers caved not because of facts of law, but because of the expense of the lawsuits, at which point they signed the agreement with the poison pill in it that they were certain to violate but apparently did not realize such at the time. I note that the judgement you mention are a result of forum shopping in countries where the World Wrestling Federation did not operate. It is likely that judgments in a foreign court would not have been enforceable in a US court upon a US company if the US company did not do business in those countries (i.e. the foreign court lacked jurisdiction) or did business only via a non-owned foreign partner (at which point the recourse would be against the foreign partner, not the US company). But of course this relies on Vince McMahon being competent when it comes to protecting against forum shopping and the whole situation shows that he was utterly incompetent at anything dealing with legal protection of his enterprises.
Regarding UK charities, there are significant differences between UK law and US law when it comes to speech, whether commercial or political. In the US, for example, the burden of proof is upon the plaintiff to prove infringing speech, whilst in the UK it is upon the defendant to prove that his speech did not infringe upon the rights of another entity. The end result is that US charities cannot engage in the sort of behavior that UK charities engage in, it would be thrown out of court as a violation of the 1st Amendment rights of those speaking about the charity. This undoubtedly greatly annoys the American Red Cross, which has come under fire recently for corruption and incompetence and under UK law would have been allowed to sue its critics. Such lawsuits in the US would likely result in SLAPP counter-suits on the part of the defendants that would result in the charity being forced to pay the complete legal costs of the defendants plus substantial punitive damages, since being sued for protected speech creates an actionable counter-claim in states that have SLAPP laws. But of course that is US law, applicable only to US entities that only do business in the US. The international situation is more complex, and anybody intending to do business internationally should contract with experts in international law to structure things properly to deal with the ugly reality of international forum shopping.
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I’ll disagree about how ‘certain’ it was that they would violate it. There was certainly scope to carry on fighting the actual case. But they chose not to (probably for cost reasons as you say).
Once they entered into that agreement and breached it, there was no way they were going to win.
That’s not quite accurate.
The background to the Swiss case was a whole period in which the Federation was registering WWF as a trademark in various jurisdictions. So they were at the least attempting to prepare for operation in those jurisdictions.
The Fund objected to those trademark applications, the Federation objected to a few of the Fund’s attempts to register trademarks:
So, I’ll certainly agree with you on the incompetence bit. It’s hard to argue that they are wrong to say there is a risk of confusion when you are saying the same thing about their logo…
That is of course possible. The US is charmingly protectionist in many ways and why not. It would however still have scuppered any attempts to make money outside the US (which at the time was a potential goldmine).
I’m not sure what any of the rest of your post has to do with the Fund/Federation spat? It’s not a particularly accurate description of the UK law on defamation (although close enough from a US perspective).
We certainly manage to criticise charities somehow despite our defamation laws.
Which (to bring us back to the WWF), the Federation had. Just, as you say, at a bad time for the owners/managers and evidently they didn’t get very good advice or they didn’t listen.
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