Trademark lawsuit ends in critic's favor

Retailing monolith Wal-Mart hit a wall in its trademark suit against a small business that parodied the business.

It's understandable why Wal-Mart found sites like Walocaust and Wal-Qaeda unpleasant to see. When they protested on the grounds of trademark infringement, a federal court decided Charles Smith, owner of the sites, had First Amendment protection for his satires.

Smith, like thousands of other small business owners, has no love of the global retailing behemoth that wrecked mom and pop businesses across the country. His merchandise, sold through CafePress, equated Wal-Mart's business model with historical flashpoints of mass destruction.

After a couple of years in the court system, a judge sided with Smith, according to Public Citizen:

Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr.’s decision reaffirms an important point of trademark law – that even though a parody is placed on a T-shirt and sold, it nevertheless represents non-commercial speech that is fully protected by the First Amendment and, thus, is not a proper basis for a trademark action, said Paul Alan Levy, a Public Citizen attorney, who represented Smith along with Gerald Weber of Atlanta.

At its core, the decision considered the argument that people would confuse Smith's wares for actual Wal-Mart trademarks, and found the argument wanting. A little victory for the small business world, perhaps, but a victory nonetheless.