A Good Reason to Boycott Champagne

“French wine snobs warn Apple not to release ‘Champagne” Colored iPhone”

This is why people hate lawyers, isn’t it? Isn’t this why no matter how mean and offensive lawyer jokes can be, no one ever says, “hey, knock it off, lawyers are people too!”

The Interprofessional Committee for Champagne Wine, whose charge is to protect the regional identity of the Champagne drink against unjustified usage of the term, believes it can tell the producers of a phone that they may not use the term “champagne” to describe the color of the phone.

In the past, sparkling wines not produced in Champagne, but having the term “Champagne” on their label, have been forced to stop using the term. According to the Washington Post Blog, Perrier was sued for marketing one of its products as “The champagne of mineral waters” and a yogurt was forced to stop marketing its product as being “champagne flavored”.

I get this. These are things one ingests.

But now the protectors of the Champagne brand want to claim a non-consumable item that has nothing to do with food, drink, ingesting, etc. may not use the term “Champagne” in any way to describe the color of the item—like an iPhone? That’s precedent setting and so likely to fail on legal grounds that one can only assume this claim hasn’t been thought through, or that it was thought through after drinking a couple of bottles of the kind of crappy Champagne that gives you headaches and fuzzy thoughts.

Listen to this explanation by the legal director of the Interprofessional Committee for Champagne, Chalres Goamaere: “We can’t say that a ‘champagne’ colour exists. Therefore, any company wanting to use the name ‘Champagne’ would be doing so [only] to attract all the benefits that surround [the label.]“

Whether or not M. Goamaere can say if a “Champagne Color” exists or not is a problem that M. Goamaere has to deal with. Clearly Apple can say this, along with probably half the population on earth.

I hate these kinds of attention getting, nuisance, useless lawsuits that do nothing but suck equity out of companies for no good reason other than it can be sucked out. You don’t see them too often in the wine industry. I hope Apple tells Champagne, “Va t’empaler encule”.

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