Doctor Pamela Isley
I'd love to do The Estate of Charles Atlas versus DC Comics, but I'm sure that Kay knows scads more about it than I do. sweatdrop I'll put something together.
The trouble is that what happened in court is very simple...
Jeffrey C. Hogue, president of Charles Atlas Ltd, said "There has to be a limit to how far you can let someone ridicule your trademark"
(
Why? Is satire only allowed if it promises not to be effective?)
District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald stubbornly thought that that wacky First Amendment of yours was more important and ruled that the issues of
Doom Patrol in question were, "precisely the type of expression of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect."
And the Atlas suit got chucked out of court in a very clean win for DC.
Where it gets complicated is that DC then came to some sort of out-of-court agreement with the Atlas estate in order to prevent them chancing thier arm with any further legal action or challenges. Lots of people online will tell you exactly what this agreement consisted of, and all of them will vary wildly on the details. Either way, since they're reprinting the issue around which the case was made in the forthcoming
Doom Patrol vol.4: Musclebound trade, which has Flex on the cover and hypes the Flex-content in the solict, then it seems like as of 2006 DC have thrown caution to the wind.
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