Burning Man Threatens Quizno's For 'Theft Of Intellectual Property' Because Of A Quizno's Ad Mocking Burning Man

Lots of folks have really strong opinions -- both positive and negative -- about Burning Man, the big "festival/experiment/one-week city in the desert" or whatever you want to call it. But no matter what you think of Burning Man, it's always seemed odd that the organization behind it acts like a crazy intellectual property maximalist at times -- including using twisted interpretations of copyright and trademark law to stop people from doing anything Burning Man doesn't like with photos from the event. It required attendees to sign over the copyright on any photos taken, for instance.

But the latest move by Burning Man is really crazy. Just as this year's festival was ending last week, the sandwich chain Quizno's (long known for their amusing internet-ready commercials), released a pretty funny commercial mocking the commercialization of Burning Man in a way that pokes almost as much fun at Quizno's itself as it does at Burning Man. It does, certainly, mock the event for becoming pretty commercialized and "a place for rich people to check off their bucket list." And, it appears that the Burning Man organization has absolutely no sense of humor and is trying to find some way to sue Quizno's over this, claiming it's "theft of intellectual property."

Burning Man takes issue with the clip and is considering legal action, not because of the mockery it makes of the more than 70,000-person annual event but because the video is theft of the event's intellectual property, according to Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham.

"We are pretty proactive about protecting our 10 principles, one of which is decommodification," Graham said. "We get a quite a number of requests each year from companies wanting to gift participants with their product or to capture imagery or video of their products at the event, and we turn them all down."

I have no idea what that last paragraph means. You can be proactive about protecting whatever principles you want, but it doesn't allow you to sue someone for making a parody. There was no intellectual property infringed in this ad. Get over yourself, Burning Man.

"We'll be coordinating with our legal team to see what action we can take," Graham said.

And hopefully your legal team tells you can't do jack shit about this. Nor should you. You should relax a bit and laugh at something funny and move on with your lives.

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