BeerBorg

So stupid....
I'll be sure not to watch their upcoming movie.

I don't understand the backlash against Toho?

It's not wrong for a company to protect their property/Trademarks/characters, etc.
There's a reason that Disney and Lucas protect their stuff so vigorously - it's to ensure that others can't make money off their product/name. In my opinion, this is more than just "close", it's way over the line in terms of infringing upon their rights. And if there is a movie coming out the merchandising could be huge so they are within their rights, and common sense to me, to defend Godzilla (or in this case Mechagodzilla) and all likeness of it.

I agree Kealia. As a small business owner myself, we go to great lengths to make sure our brand isn't infringed upon (and we have nothing close to godzilla popularity...). This isn't a case of the corporate fat cats beating up on the little guy. This is protecting your brand and following both the intent and letter of the law.

Whose going to confuse a movie with a beer though?
Mecha HopZilla is a play on words. The beer won't generate extra revenue because of some old movie, or some coming up movie.
It won't cause them to lose revenue.

Godzilla is pretty much public domain at this point, I mean who doesn't know about Godzilla?

Why didn't they sue southpark for Mecha Streisand?

And it's a beer vs a movie, no one will confuse the products.

I'm just sick of all this litigation against beer names. Let be be free man, it's creative naming.

It's one thing if two beers from the same location are name the same thing. When a homebrew shop sues a brewery for having a somewhat similar name, 15 states over, that has no distribution outside their state...man screw them. No one is going to confuse your crappy homebrew store with a local beer in a different state.

Meanwhile Budweiser blatantly copies flying dog's beer packaging styles, and asks for those copy cats beers to be place next to flying dog's.
But yeah, they have the money for good lawyers so they can get away with bullying people.

Seems like this company is being a bully to a small craft brewery when it will not affect them in the least.

The point is that the owners of the movie name have the rights. If you use it for foot powder then you have to go to them for permission, or to license the rights.

RickBeer wrote:The point is that the owners of the movie name have the rights. If you use it for foot powder then you have to go to them for permission, or to license the rights.

They own the rights to Mecha Godzilla, not Mecha Hopzilla.
Maybe it's similar enough to constitute infringement, but it's a dick move IMHO.
They can be sure to never get any of my money.

Looks to me like they were asking for it, with the name being so close and the label showing a mechanical dinosaur!

Why couldn't they have used Mega instead of Mecha?

Assuming they have a lawyer, and assuming he's any good, he should have said "We'll get caught. Maybe it won't be too painful, but we'll get caught.". It was a bonehead move.

I'm sure the movie company is very worried that all the beer drinkers won't watch their movie...

Two things I know I learned from this. Hadn't heard of NOLA Brewery prior to this. They look pretty good (they also have other "zilla" named brews, so not their first attempt to get in trouble). And there is another Godzilla movie coming out in 2014. Probably wouldn't have known about either if it weren't for this lawsuit. I doubt either is crying too much about the free publicity...

Perhaps both sides will come to some sort of agreement that results in a win-win.


Rick

At my local beer shop, I was told there are already small rumblings of rumors that NOLA will cease producing the beer in cans until they have a new design, or, they may cease selling it in cans entirely (they only started selling this in cans last year) since they feel they may not want to fight the giant. All rumors or course but since I only had one around I grabbed 2 more. Never know if they'll be worth a cup of coffee in the future.

That's a pretty bad ass lookin can!

It really isn't a great beer. I used to like it but it's all bitter and not much flavor. Though, I've had some uber fresh at the brewery and it's much more enjoyable. It does open your nose.