Farhad Manjoo, Salon, March 26, 2008
To put it mildly, Charles Smith, a 50-year-old computer store owner in Conyers, Ga., isn’t a fan of Wal-Mart. Indeed he considers the retailing giant to be plying the same moral trade as Adolph Hitler and Osama Bin Laden — and to prove his seriousness, Smith has gone and done something that requires a good deal of courage. He’s designed a few impolite bumper stickers and T-shirts.
Smith’s two Web sites, Wal-Qaeda and Walocaust, take for granted your hatred of Wal-Mart, and consequently offer little reasoned criticism of the firm. Instead, here you’ll find an entire worldview squeezed into a slogan like, “Support our Troops: Boycott Wal-Qaeda.”
One has to do some hefty mental work to conceive of a way that any of this stuff could pose an economic threat to Wal-Mart. But incredibly, Wal-Mart felt threatened by Smith’s work, and a couple years ago it filed a trademark infringement suit.
Hey Wal-Mart, do you understand the legal definition of “trademark infringement”? For Smith to be violating your mark, consumers would need to be confused by the similarity of his logo to yours. Do you think that’s possible — that someone seeing a Walocaust or Wal-Qaeda logo might reasonably conclude that it’s an official Wal-Mart production? If so, you must have either a very low opinion of your customers, or of your brand. Not a good sign.