So it seems that the outrage over The Lactivist’s pork incident has caused the National Pork Board to apologize!
Was this another case of over-defense of a trademark, or something else? Jennifer has the whole wrap up in the link above. Here are my thoughts:
1. Its awesome to get an apology and see that the Pork Board employees going out of their way to donate personally to Jennifer’s cause.
2. I don’t see this as a win for Jennifer. She has agreed to remove the “offending” shirt which I still don’t believe (and I’m no lawyer) is a violation of any kind of copyright (it’s satire!).
Jennifer has since put up a Pork Board “approved” shirt that reads, “Breast: The original white milk.” Well, that’s just boring and it loses all of its effectiveness of playing off the Pork slogan. It’s just another shirt touting breast milk.
Having to pull the shirt and get approval of another one kind of makes the apology ring a bit false. Yes, that’s compensated by their generous and personal donations to be sure, but that’s the employees, not an official action of the pork board.
While the Pork Board has a right to protect their brand, I don’t believe this was the place to go after it. But either way, they accomplished what they set out to do: to force Jennifer to remove a shirt which they disapproved of.