Friday, January 8, 2010

Your Wife is Hot-Or Not-Trademark Infringement Suit Settles

The trademark infringement lawsuit filed by Air Around the Clock against All Year Cooling of Fort Lauderdale was dismissed based upon a confidential settlement.  The SunSentinel has a story about the settlement HERE,  the Palm Beach Post had a story when the suit was filed HERE and a SunSentinel story when the suit was filed HERE [hosted by the Miami Herald].

The issue in the lawsuit was the alleged infringment of Air Around the Clock's "Your wife is hot. Better get your A/C fixed" billboard advertising campaign when All Year Cooling of Fort Lauderdale allegedly started a billboard campaign stating "Your wife is not hot because you called All Year Cooling."

An image from the Air Around the Clock web site is below:

An image of the All Year Cooling of Fort Lauderdale billboard from NBC Miami web site [see HERE] is below:



The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of Florida and assigned to Judge Cohn.  The complaint can be viewed HERE,  the motion to dismiss HERE and the answer HERE.  If interested, the complaint has a few additional pictures as exhibits. The SunSentinel has a video of the two billboards which can be viewed HERE.

Random

Air Around the Clock has two articles on its web site about the ad campaign. 

The first article was titled "Your Wife is HOT!" and the second article was titled "Dueling Billboards."  The first article stated "Check out the new billboard ads from Air Around the Clock featuring the Your Wife is Hot billboard and Your Wife is Not Hot billboard...." 

In the second article, posted on a later date, Air Around the Clock stated that it was in a "billboard war" because All Year Cooling came up with the slogan "Your Wife Is Not Hot."  The second article continued that "You’ve seen them on the highway now see them on the news. We are talking about the Your Wife is Hot billboards found throughout South Florida’s busy highways and now they are being featured on the news. What is so news worthy about the Air Around the Clock...a competitors....YOUR WIFE IS HOT ad campaign."

It is somewhat odd, and now irrelevant, that Air Around the Clock claimed to be using a campaign and very quickly changed course and claimed a competitor had created the same campaign.  The second article, on day one of the attention and dispute, immediately noted "it looks like these dueling billboards will be heading to the courtrooms." [emphasis in the article].  You can reach your own conclusions.

Also interesting is the fact that the ad campaign is apparently used throughout the country and has been for some time.  The image below is from THIS site, and also appears on THIS site, and is a Jon Wayne A/C company in San Antonio.


1 comments:

Unknown said...

Here's a local ac repair company
billboard!

http://www.pipedoc.net/images/WifeHot.jpg

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