This is going to sound like a bunch of hot air, but it’s not. Air-O-Matic, Inc., the company behind the “Pull My Finger” iPhone app, threatened legal action against InfoMedia, the company blasting out iFart Mobile, for trademark infringement.
After finally winning passage from Apple’s application crew, iFart, featuring sounds like “Jack the Ripper” and “Brown Mosquito,” became the number one downloaded app for the iPhone over the holiday season, easily overpowering its rival Pull My Finger, which is also a popular app. Infomedia used the age-old dad joke in its promotions, and linked to its site with the phrase in press releases.
Air-0-Matic explains on the company blog that Infomedia founder Joel Comm directly targeted Pull My Finger fans by tooting at them on Twitter and by posting bogus reviews on iTunes cracking that iFart was better.That’s when Air-O-Matic cried foul, and citing a trademark filing in December 2008 for “pull my finger,” the company demanded reimbursement for lost effluvia-related iPhone hilarity revenue. From Air-0-Matic’s blog:
We just say “it stinks.”
OUR OPINION: I talked with a well known iPhone consultant about this (I’ll leave his name out, for his sake!) at MacWorld in January, and he said we should expose Joel Comm for these dirty tactics. We didn’t want to make a big deal out it, since the whole thing is so silly. He said, rightly, that it’s not just this app, but the fact that the developer is using dirty tactics to bury his competition, and that means bad things for all honest devs if it’s left undefended. It’s true… we estimate he cost us about $500K in sales. His app leapfrogged ours immediately after he started doing these things.
Smelling trouble (the puns, you understand, are obligatory), Infomedia wafted into court to seek declaratory judgment that though both companies smelt it, neither of them dealt it. “Pull my finger,” argues Infomedia, is commonly used slang and should qualify as fair use.
Various media outlets (including this one) are having a flatulence-pun field day. You’d think, for journalistic integrity at least, these writers would cut the cheese for once.
