Juice sucks, drink wine!

If you’ve picked up a Rolling Stone in the last few years, you would have seen David Rees’s bitingly humorous comic strip Get Your War On.

Rees uses clip art and adds his own commentary (which was mostly a response to post-9/11 Bush politics), and while the clip art is fair use, Rees is crying foul play on this advertising by Jamba Juice, which seems to put the clip art in the exact same positions with the exact same text style.

Part of Rees’s (hilarious) response to the ad:

2. The clip art is public domain, of course, anyone can do anything with it … but check out the word balloons! JAMBA JUICE TOTALLY BIT MY GYWO WORD BALLOON STYLE! Rounded-edge text box with single line pointing to mouth? I developed that in 2001 using Quark XPress 4!!! THAT’S MY SHIT!!! Jamba Juice, you’re a bunch of BALLOON-BITERS.

3. First person to sue Jamba Juice on my behalf CAN KEEP ALL THE MONEY. All I care about is destroying Jamba Juice and their overpriced dumb-ass juices. EAT A PIECE OF FRUIT, you morons, you’re missing most of the fiber.

Rees also urges us all to boycott Jamba Juice, which I can manage since we don’t have any in Canada.

This issue is interesting because it’s a fine line between homage and ripping someone off. One of the responses I saw said:

Any IP nerd will quickly tell you an “idea” alone is not protected; but while the idea of doing a comic based on a depressing, stale office environment using public domain clip art cannot be protected under US copyright, has this crossed over from being the “idea” of a GYWO-like comic to a cognizable claim of infringement?  Could you, or should you, be able to claim that while Rees can’t claim copyright infringement from use of a public domain work, he should be able to claim it when Jamba uses the same two public domain works in the same context?I’m rarely (maybe never) one to advocate an expansion of intellectual property law, and I’m trying very hard to imagine how I would feel if Rees ripped on Jamba Juice instead of the other way around, but I feel as though the law should provide remedy for this sort of shameless ripoff.

I doubt any sort of lawsuit will come of this, or will go very far if it does, but it’s an interesting to consider how far the law protects an artist’s work that is partly public domain.