Chick-fil-A Sues Vermont Artist, Invokes Streisand Effect
November 29, 2011 
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Chick-fil-A’s legal team must be bored and have nothing better to do. At least nothing better than pursuing legal action against an artist for using a generic part of their tagline.
Muller-Moore, an artist who sells t-shirts through his website is being bullied by Chic-Fil-A to stop. Why? Because his t-shirts say “eat more kale” and Chick-fil-A’s tagline is “”Eat Mor Chikin.”
Naturally, all this does is invoke the Streisand Effect where in this case the brand’s attempt to suppress an artist’s freedom is causing the story to be far more widely publicized:
Chick-fil-A lawyers claim Muller-Moore’s effort to promote use of his “eat more kale” message “is likely to cause confusion of the public and dilutes the distinctiveness of Chick-fil-A’s intellectual property and diminishes its value.”
Of course, this is absurd. Trademark law shouldn’t apply here because it’s a totally different business and there’s little chance of customer confusion. Would anyone really confuse the two of these?
But aside from this it’s just silly and accomplishes nothing except for taking the reputation of Chick-fil-A further down a notch. In a connected world, this type of legal bullying against someone completely disparate from a company’s industry is far more damaging to a brand than any good that could come out of it. This isn’t protecting Chick-fil-A. It is shameful and shows a complete lack of corporate conscience and goodwill.
It is extremely reminiscent of the story of Pillsbury threatening a small business owner last year. Note because the web is referential, we continue to bring up past examples of brands doing this. What these companies don’t realize is in a digital world their reputation management issues are not going to go away. Rather, the negative effect on their brand is cumulative.
Josh Braaten replied | Nov 30, 2011 (32 comments)
Better watch out, Adam. You have a website, and so does Chick-Fil-A. You’re obviously causing confusion of the public and should be stopped. Sad thing is, they could arguably win with how messed up the justice system is around technology copyright law.
Adam Singer replied | Nov 30, 2011 (597 comments)
Hah, me along with the 200+ other sites that covered the story.
Samantha McCollough replied | Nov 30, 2011 (15 comments)
Any idea what warrants this kind of over the top response? It also reminds me of the recent story about Gov Brownback (I am sure you have heard of it) going over the edge about a 16 yr old girls tweet to her 60 or so followers. Is it fear? What if this kale guy strikes it rich and take over their industry? Is it just overzealous businesses? I am always curious as to the thought process behind stories like this. Have to agree with you too, it consistently does more harm to the big name brand than anything else.
nic rossouw replied | Dec 5, 2011 (1 comment)
i don’t see what the confusion is. the chick-fil-a slogan despite being three words long is filled with spelling errors, as is the idiotic name of their corporation. i think muller-moore should counter-sue for the damage they are causing to the english language. if a few tee-shirts in vermont threaten to bring this corporation to its knees, they have bigger problems than brand confusion.