The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

BoingBoing is reporting that Heavy Ink, a Massachusetts based comics retailer, has been sent a letter from a firm of LA lawyers apparently acting on behalf of Olivia Munn (no, I’m afraid I had no idea who she was either). They are claiming that a comic book HI are selling, Brian Denham’s Celebrity Showdown: Olivia Munn, was produced without her consent to use her image and that HI should remove it from their site and destroy all stock of it. I have no idea of the legal side of fair use on the likeness of public figures, but it does seem very odd to be going after a retailer in this manner rather than the publisher (in this case Antarctic) or the creator; its not the job of a comic or bookstore to police the content of every single title they sell and such concerns as the rather lengthily-named legal firm are expressing should surely be directed to them? If retailers of any kind simply destroyed their stock when asked by someone I’d imagine pretty soon we’d have no businesses of any sort functioning anywhere. Heavy Ink is refusing the demand at the moment; I suspect over the next week or two we’re likely to hear more about this. One thing is for sure though, if they were trying to remove something their client didn’t approve of then, like so many others before them, they have only really succeeded in bringing it to the attention of a much wider audience, where if it was left alone hardly anyone would have noticed or bothered about the comic at all, so quite possibly a bit of an own-goal there.