Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Hells Angels sue Amazon, fashion label, over t-shirt

The Hells Angels are a contentious bunch: they ruined Altamont (and by extension, created an allegory for every rock writer ever to use to represent the death of the '60s), stomped Hunter S. Thompson, and now they're suing over a t-shirt design.
L.A. brand Wildfox and Amazon.com have both been slapped with lawsuits by the venerable motorcycle club for selling t-shirts that read "My boyfriend s a Hells Angel" (what is with the lack of apostrophes in this story?) on the front and feature the club's iconic wings on the back.
"We bring these lawsuits from time to time not just to punish but to educate," Hells Angels' attorney Fritz Clapp told the Los Angeles Times. "Somebody thought erroneously that Hells Angels is a generic term."
He's only half-right about the generic term part. Sans apostrophe, the name refers to the motorcycle club, but correctly punctuated, it was the name of a World War II pilot squadron nearly twenty years before the gang was formed, and you don't see them suing like assholes all the time. The Hells Angels need to stop pretending their club is some longstanding American institution like the Algonquin Hotel or Bachman-Turner Overdrive or the Fightin' Irish.
Anyway, it's just one more lawsuit to tack on to the Hells Angels "legacy." The largely overweight, bearded drug-traffickers have also sued Saks Fifth Avenue, Zappos, and Alexander McQueen. Shouldn't they just be stomping these people instead of suing them? How the mighty have fallen.
 

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