Screwed By The Lawyers / Real Life

• Some years ago a British food company produced a brand of chips [fries] called Stringfellows, which had to be withdrawn when nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow objected to the name.
• McDonald's' Corp. tried to force a Scottish fine dining establishment named McDonald's to close or change its name despite the latter being in business for over a century. The fast food chain lost the case. It helped that the Scottish restaurant was run by a high member of Clan McDonald.
  • McDonald's Corp. also attempted this in Malaysia, except that the dining establishment in question was a small Indian/Pakistani restaurant (which was still opened at the time) whose only offense is that its name vaguely resembled McDonald's. The fast food chain lost that case, too.
  • One of the cases they did win was to convince a San Francisco coffeeshop to change its name from McCoffee, whose name was a pun on the name of the owner Elizabeth McCaughey, a good decade before they got into the coffee business themselves. These and many other examples can be found at The Other Wiki.
    • It's not particularly common to see parodies that use fast-food chains named "Mc-anything", or real-life businesses named "Mc-Anything", because McDonald's has been so aggressive and successful at suing anybody who tries to, even when the business in question has nothing to do with food. Walmart has taken on this role of late, going after all the "-Mart"s of the world. Though in both cases, this is largely because they can lose their valuable trademarks if they don't pursue every known possible infringement; the legal term is "Abandonment".
  • An interesting case involving McDonald's came in the early 1990s, when they sued a South African businessman who was opening hundreds of fake McDonald's restaurants, complete with Big Macs. They lost this case because they had abandoned the trademark (not having operated in South Africa during The Apartheid Era), and ended up buying the guy out.
  • They also attempted this on Supermacs, objecting to how the name of the restaurant, found only in Ireland, was infringing on their trademark of "Big Mac", but it backfired spectacularly. Under EU law, genuine use of a trademark exists to guarantee the identity of the origin of goods and it was found that McDonald's had insufficient evidence to establish genuine use. This resulted in revocation of the trademark in the entire EU — not only would they have to bear the cost of the revocation, and not only did it allow Supermacs to expand outside of Ireland, but it also allowed them and anyone else to sell products called "Big Macs". Oops. Burger King in the EU wasted no time mocking them by changing all their menu item names to things like "Like a Big Mac but actually big" and "Kind of like a Big Mac but juicier and tastier."
• Holiday Inn twice had problems with previously established hotels that used the same name. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the chain's hotels in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina had to be called "Holiday Lodge" because a local motel already used the "Holiday Inn" name before the chain was founded; the local motel even used signage which resembled the chain's, though they were forced by court injunction in 1973 to switch to different lettering. The chain couldn't open an hotel in Niagara Falls, Ontario for a long time because another local hotel that opened before the chain was operating in Canada already used the name. The chain lost a lawsuit to force them to rename and was forced to list them as "not part of this chain of Holiday Inns" in their directory and to use holiday-inn.com as their domain because the local hotel already had the holidayinn.com domain. Eventually, the owners of the local hotel joined the chain (and gave them their web domain), but were later dropped and had to rename themselves.
• Sony has in the past gone after restaurants called Soni's. Back in the late 80s, they forced the closure of an upscale Baltimore restaurant that had been in business for over 30 years.
• Toho is extremely aggressive in protecting their Godzilla trademark, even going after anyone who uses a name ending in -zilla, such as a steak house using the name Steakzilla.
• Hasbro and DreamWorks Animation had planned a merger in November 2014. The talks, however, were called off after only two days. Although a common reason was disagreement over CEO's Jeffrey Katzenberg's sale price, which analysts viewed to be more than the company's actual worth, others claim that the talks were called off when Disney, DreamWorks' rival, threatened to cancel their deals and contracts with Hasbro if the merger went forward. With DreamWorks getting acquired by NBCUniversal in 2016, it seems Hasbro's actions to cancel the merger were justified.
• Thanks to original network founder and televangelist Pat Robertson, Freeform is contractually obligated to air The 700 Club every weekday, excluding most weekends except for telethons. The channel has done everything to ensure that the network's main demographic never watch it, with a metric ton of roadblocks and disclaimers before it. The obligations came about when Robertson spun the CBN Family Channel off into a for-profit corporation, which was later bought out by a joint venture of Fox and Saban Entertainment and rebranded as Fox Family (later bought out by Disney and rebranded as ABC Family). ^note A rumor claimed Robertson also stipulated that "Family" had to remain in the network's name, but this was debunked when the channel was renamed Freeform in 2015; in fact, "Family" was kept only because it was written into previous contracts with cable providers.
• Ay, yi, yi, the screwing Marvel Comics was giving to just about every company before Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox. Website Bleeding Cool has been chronicling various companies who have been forced to stop doing anything related to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. This has gone so far as to have t-shirts that boasted covers of Secret Wars (2015) having characters replaced and edited out. Even Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite lacked any X-Men/Fantastic Four presence. The big rumor towards this is that Marvel and 20th Century Fox were in a spat because Fox refused to give back the rights to their movies. (There are even more rumors that this was because of Disney buying out Lucasfilm, thus screwing them out of Star Wars. It's really petty.) Evidence of this could be seen throughout the 2010s, when you were far, far more likely to see Iron Man on a video game box art or superhero team than the trope-naming Wolverine, simply because Marvel/Disney had the film rights to the former but not the latter. Come Disney's buyout of Fox, and guess who's front and center on the cover of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3?
• Apple Inc. tried to sue Solid Group,^note They used to distribute Sony products in the Philippines until the late 90s when Sony opened up a Philippine division of the company a company in the Philippines who sold MyPhone^note Not to be confused with the unrelated MyPhone brand from Poland though they share similar Mediatek underpinnings. handsets in the country, claiming that the name is a little too phonetically similar to the iPhone line. Not only that they lost the case (as who would even confuse an iconic smartphone with a bunch of patriotically-themed phones anyway?), they were criticized as "a case of a giant trying to claim more territory than what it is entitled to, to the great prejudice of a local "Pinoy Phone" merchant who has managed to obtain a significant foothold in the mobile phone market through the marketing and sale of innovative products under a very distinctive trademark".
• Peter Brewis, a musical parodist who could be thought of as a British take on "Weird Al" Yankovic, was royally screwed after writing a take-off of Kate Bush for Not the Nine O'Clock News. After its performance on TV by impressionist Pamela Stephenson, lawyers for Ms Bush pounced and swerved a lawsuit. Brewis lost all the royalties on the song, which was held to be so musically close to "Them Heavy People" as to not be a parody at all, more the Bush original with new lyrics. Any and all royalties on the song, which went onto spin-off LP's and which is frequently repeated by the BBC, now go in their entirety to Kate Bush, who is legally held to have written it.
• Attempts by Chuck E. Cheese to acknowledge the existence of The Rock-afire Explosion in their 40 Years of Fun promotion had to be excised quickly after Aaron Fetcher, still angry at CEC for trying to take the Rock-afire Explosion from him so they could stop paying royalties and licensing fees, raised a stink.
• Thanks to Disney acquiring the rights to it in their merger with 21st Century Fox, the iconic 20th Century Fox fanfare can no longer be used by the Fox network or its news and sports properties. Before then, the fanfare was present as a generic network theme as well as some promos from the '80s and '90s.
• Defied by Ike's Love and Sandwiches, a chain found mostly on the US west coast, which received a cease-and-desist letter from KFC over their use of the phrase "finger-licking good" in their mission statement. The response from Ike's was to photocopy that cease-and-desist letter and proudly frame it at all of their locations. They would also replicate that mission statement on the walls right above the cease-and-desist letter with the phrase "finger-licking good" taped over. In this case, the legal dispute is at a stalemate and still ongoing; KFC's lawyers have stayed vigilant of Ike's, waiting for their revenge.
• Amvest, a public domain distributor of music and videos, got hit with this multiple times:
  • Their Audiofidelity label released a record called The Happy Chipmunks Sing Michael Jackson, but due to a lawsuit from Bagdasarian, the album was renamed The Happy Hamsters Sing Michael Jackson. The band's lead singer would later become the host of the label's Kid Pics videos.
  • In order to avoid this trope, the label's tapes that guest-starred Al Lewis of The Munsters renamed his character "Grampa".
  • The company became Passport Video in 2004 because of a lawsuit over unlicensed Disney shorts being used on a few of their tapes.
  • The DVD release of Grampa's Silly Scaries removed the shorts "The Mad Doctor" and "The Impatient Patient" and replaced them with the short "The Raven" because those shorts were no longer considered public domain.
• In April 2001, right before featuring in that month's issue of Brazilian lad mag VIP, the funk carioca dancer Ariane Latuf, aka "Enfermeira do Funk"◊^note Funk Nurse, got a cease-and-desist from the Nurses' Union for performing in a skimpy nurse costume as her act. As a result, Ariane's then-upcoming shoot for Playboy Brazil was delayed to digitally paint◊ her nurse cap and surgical mask pink, while referring to her as "Proibida do Funk"^note loosely translated, the Forbidden Girl of Funk — a tongue-in-cheek reference to her good looks and the C&D.
• British political satirist Jonathan Harvey used a new alter-ego, Count Binface, for the 2019 UK election after the viral attention given to his previous alter-ego, Lord Buckethead, led to legal issues with Todd Durham, who created Lord Buckethead as a character for the 1984 film Hyperspace.
• In 1995, DTS released a quieter alternative to their "The Digital Experience" logo known as the "Water Drop". After sending it to theatres, however, they were threatened with a lawsuit from Imagine Entertainment, due to the new logo being too similar to theirs. As a result, it was withdrawn and is considered lost media.
• In 2019, DS Automobiles (division of Peugeot-Citröen, later Stellantis) sued Polestar (Volvo Cars' electric subsidiary) for infringing the chevrons-shaped logo trademark, causing Polestar vehicles to be banned in France.
• Ever wonder why DC Comics' logo no longer has the once iconic stars on them since their logo rebrand in 2012? Well, blame this trope. To put it shortly, back in 2011, DC attempted to sue DC Shoes^note no relation for copyright infringement (since their logo had a star like the comic company). However, DC Comics ended up losing the lawsuit when it was found out that they didn't trademark their own logo, allowing the DC shoe company to swoop in and trademark their logo and then counter-sue DC Comics for copyright infringement, which forced them to redesign their logo to avoid further legal action.
• A meme lampshades this. "How to Draw Mickey Mouse" is a four-panel piece with the first panel caption "Draw three circles" (large circle for a head, two small circles for ears). Second panel: "Add a heart shape" (partial heart to form around the mouth). Third panel: "Receive letter from Disney legal" ("Cease and Desist" stamp over the panel art). Fourth: "How to draw a cat. Draw a circle and two triangles..."

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