Skip to main content

Company suing Kmart for stealing its banana costume settles

[ad_1]


The New Jersey-based costume company suing Kmart for stealing its banana costume has reached a settlement outside the court, said Rasta Imposta CEO Robert Berman.



"We're going to continue selling to Kmart in the future," Berman told CNBC.



Berman declined to provide details of the settlement.




For almost a decade, Kmart had purchased Rasta Imposta's banana suit costume, a full-body yellow peel with a black stem at the head and foot. But this Halloween season Kmart didn't order the banana costume after "the parties had some difficulty reaching an agreement," and Kmart decided to buy its banana costume from another vendor, according to the court filing.



Kmart declined to comment.



When Berman saw Kmart's new banana costume, however, he went bananas.



"When you take a design that has the same pattern, that's infringing," he said. "Bananas are copyright-able."



Indeed, Rasta Imposta owns a copyright registration for the banana costume design with the U.S. Copyright Office. In September, Rasta Imposta filed a lawsuit against Kmart and its parent company Sears, seeking damages.



The banana costume is an integral part of Berman's business - he sells thousands of the yellow suits each year, he said. "We've tried a lot of fruits and vegetables, but there's something about bananas that are inherently funny," he said.



He refuted that he was trying to secure a monopoly over the banana costume. "Be creative and come up with your own interpretation of the banana," Berman said.



But June Besek, a copyright professor at Columbia Law School, said that it's tricky to create a different kind of banana than the one we're all used to seeing at the supermarket.



"There's just this overwhelming impression of a banana that you can't get around," Besek told CNBC.





[ad_2]

Share & Written By CNBC

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

[ad_1] It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. Though it cycled through several names in its history, "Operation Popeye" stuck. Its stated objectives—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—were never realized, the revelation that the U.S. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

University supercomputers are science's unsung heroes, and Texas will get the fastest yet

[ad_1] Supercomputers are powerful machines with great names—Blue Waters, Bridges, Jetstream, Comet. But a new one will soon be joining that list: Frontera. The $60 million machine will live at the University of Texas at Austin and is scheduled to come online next year. “It will be the fastest machine ever deployed at a university in the US,” says Dan Stanzione, the executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. With supercomputers, the title of fastest is a moving target—what’s perhaps more important is not the exact ranking, but that they’re available for researchers to use in the first place. Right now, the fastest supercomputer in the world is called Summit, and it’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, part of the Department of Energy (DOE), and is specifically tailored for AI. But supercomputers located not at government labs but at universities—like Frontera and its ilk—play a crucial role in the ever...
Post a Comment
Read more