Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Although Fox News, along with everyone else who cared to find out, has known for months that the title of Al Franken's forthcoming book will be Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, Fox has waited until now, when the book is probably being printed or is just about to be printed, to sue Franken and his publisher for alleged trademark infringement (Fox, appallingly, registered the phrase "Fair and Balanced" as a trademark in 1995).

I'm sure Franken's publisher, the Penguin Group, which also publishes Tom Clancy and a lot of other bigshots, and is a division of the rather large multinational Pearson Plc., will cope with this just fine. The courts have recognized that parody and satire need to have a fairly wide latitude in a free society, so this poke at Fox ought to pass legal muster.

But for now, I'm joining Eschaton and many other fine bloggers in solidarity with Al:

We are all Fair and Balanced.

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