Unlicensed marijuana shops in New York City are as ubiquitous throughout Manhattan as Starbucks coffee shops. However, almost as quickly as all the cannabis hubs sprouted, scores have been forced to close. In my Midtown neighborhood, of the six that opened this past year on a single block radius, one now sells only bongs and T-shirts, another luggage and tobacco products, and the other four are totally shuttered.
At a community board meeting I learned about the very strict prohibitions that limit the locations of marijuana retail shops—e.g., they must be 500–1,000 feet away from schools, churches, public parks and pedestrian malls and plazas. These challenging restrictions perhaps account for the handful of mobile dispensaries (aka retrofitted food trucks) that are squatting in different locations, apparently not impacted by any ordinances just yet.
One in particular, though—Starbuds on Park Avenue South and 22nd Street—has other problems …
On June 28, Starbucks filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit against Starbuds in U.S. District Court for infringement of its siren mascot. The legal action, first reported by Bloomberg Law, names Starbuds’ operator, Brandpat, for “deliberately copying the intellectual property Starbucks has developed,” an issue that Starbucks claims was brought to Starbuds’ attention several times prior to the suit. Curiously, the official Starbuds website does not utilize the truck logo at all.
On June 27, I wrote about the new generation of weed packages adorned with comic book and pop references. Parodying and sampling is seeded in the DNA of alternative culture, so this comic rendition of the Starbucks logo and brand name is not surprising … but it is confusing to consumers. Initially I was fooled—and I don’t smoke weed or drink coffee.
“Starbucks isn’t letting the brand name Starbuds Flowers fly, either,” reports Fast Company, adding that the lawsuit states the wordmark STARBUDS “sounds very similar to STARBUCKS, as they are both two-syllable marks starting with STAR. In place of the term BUCKS, [Starbuds] has substituted the phonetically similar term BUDS, which differs only by two internal letters, shares a similar pronunciation, and is likely to sound very similar when spoken.”
Parody is protected as commentary, but misappropriation is not. A court will have to determine whether this is dope or dopey.