Rules
With enough chutzpah to make a patent troll wolf-whistle, a Florida company has claimed the phrase "pull my finger" - used by a competing iPhone fart app, of course - infringes on its intellectual property.
The two sides, Air-O-Matic, maker of "Pull My Finger," and InfoMedia, developer of iFart are in negotiations to settle the dispute. Pull My Finger was once upon a time the No. 2 selling application on the iTunes store. But then it was overtaken by iFart, which has done more than $200,000 in sales since its release. Perhaps not coincidentally, that resulted in Air-O-Matic demanding $50,000 from InfoMedia as compensation for lost sales and other, uh, ***t.
iFart is about the most juvenile goddamn thing I've paid money for in the past year, which is to say I love it. You can order up a fart from a menu of disgusting ones or record your own. There's also a time-delay and a motion-sensor feature, allowing you to deploy the phone as a virtual whoopee cushion. I have no idea what Pull My Finger did or did not do, other than, of course, fart.
Naturally, someone with a juris doctor was paid a lot of money to write a C&D letter, with all of the gravity and dignity a $200/hour attorney can muster, about farting and pulling fingers. InfoMedia returned fire, asking for a declaratory judgment because "The phrase 'pull my finger' is understood to be a description of the act of passing gas, not a trademark violation."
"Believe it or not, I'm really uncomfortable with bathroom humor," Air-O-Matic co-owner Sam Magdalein told the Denver Post. "My partner is more into that kind of humor, and he pushed me a little bit into doing this as a joke. It would be pretty ridiculous to have this end up in court."
Yes it would. Wonder who took it there, Sam?
News of the legal action sent a throng of high-school sophomores to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to stake claims to other fart games, including "Two" (and its variant, "Sapes"), "Safety/Slug (The Cereal Game)" "You Ate It" and "Grenade." Bic, makers of disposable butane lighters, also filed for a patent protecting its discovery that farting on an open flame creates a giant orange fireball that is totally hilarious and impresses all your friends.
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