Laugh It Off again faces wrath of breweries
Nazma Dreyer
November 11 2004

SAB Miller is once again hauling Laugh It Off (LIO) before the Cape High Court – this time to stop the small T-shirt company’s annual publication and calendar.

This is the second time that LIO is doing battle with the second-largest brewery in the world.

In 2002 SABMiller took LIO to court over its T-shirt that sported the words “Black Labour, White Guilt. South Africa’s lively lusty exploitation since 1652. No Regard Given Worldwide.”

The words on a Black Label bottle read: “Black Label, Carling Beer. America’s Lusty Lively Beer. Brewed in South Africa.”

Earlier in 2004 the Supreme Court of Appeal rejected LIO’s appeal against a Cape High Court decision in favour of SABMiller.

Justice Roger Cleaver found the slogan was not a “harmless, clean pun” as LIO had argued, but “bordered on hate speech”.

Now SABMiller has applied for a fresh interdict against LIO to stop the printing of its annual youth publication and calendar as they include a picture of the T-shirt.

The LIO received a letter in October that said SABMiller was to apply for an interdict against the company.

The Cape High Court granted the brewery an interim interdict in November.

The matter is to be heard again next Thursday.

The annual publication is a collection of youth culture reports, stories, poems, graphics and photographs.

LIO owner Justin Nurse could not be reached for comment, but his business partner, Chris Verrijdt, said he would not comment as the matter was “delicate and there had been no developments”.

Adrian Botha, spokesperson for SABMiller London, said his company had sought an interdict to prevent Nurse from publishing material “that infringes the breweries’ trademark Carling Black Label and which would be in contravention of a high court and a Supreme Court of Appeal ruling”.

“Notwithstanding repeated requests, we have not received an acceptable undertaking from Nurse that he will refrain from publishing the infringing material.

“If we do receive an acceptable undertaking from him we will regard the matter as resolved.”

Asked whether SABMiller was not tarnishing its public image by taking the small T-shirt company to court again, Botha said: “The high court and Supreme Court of Appeal have ruled in our favour.

They pointed out that the issue had nothing to do with freedom of expression, which we strongly support.

The courts had found that Nurse’s company had abused its freedom of expression by taking a company’s trademark, distorting it and using it in products sold for its commercial gain – particularly where the effect was “to tarnish a brand without just cause”.

Here’s Laugh it Off’s version of what the Black Labour T-shirt was about. It was first published in 2000 just as the three year court battle was kicking off.

The shirt is not statement about SAB and how they might treat their staff. It is a statement about how white South Africans feel guilty about the exploitation of black people in our countries past. Initially our business was not neccesarily one of making statements or being political but just about making people laugh, a shirt that holds up a mirror to the contadictions of every day South African life. Using the Black Label logo was merely a vehicle, no one would have bought or read the shirt if it had merely said “South Africans feel guilty about exploiting black people.”

What has become an issue for us now is how brands feel they are so sacred that they are gaurded by a mile high wall of patent and copyright law. God forbid that their precious brand identity, fabricated from tasteful lies, be challenged by anyone in anyway. Black Label are suing us because we are using their logo illegaly. Fair enough if we were selling beer with an indetical label to Black Labour but we are selling T-Shirts. We are not challenging their share in the beer market. They are suing us because they feel their delicate brand identity is being shaken by our T-shirts.

What’s interesting is that the only people who care if you sell T-shirts using other brands logo’s are those who made them. The public don’t care beacause there is nothing ethically wrong about it. Macdonalds stick their logo everywhere they can, they BRAND, if they could they would brand the whole world, along with this they portray a feel and a lifestyle about their brand through advertising. To the masses = Happy, fun, healthy . If I ran a Billboard simply saying =cheap&evil I would get sued. Why? What do these brands have to hide? Their must be a reason why people want to display hate propaganda about brands and if they were free to do so maybe brands would be forced to be ethical and truthful, they couldn’t hide behind lalws that protect what ever fabrication they wish to portray. Maybe they would spend more energy trying to make the best product they can and building a better world, and those products that aren’t ethical would dissapear?

As they say in English “Upwards and onwards” (“Fok Voort” in Afrikaans) and we updated to web2.0 .

But to make a long blog entry short: By revamping our website we unearth all those lawsuits and papers that we’ve forgotten about. It’s been eight years since we received the first “letter of demand” to stop being creative and to toe the corporate line. It was to be the start of three long years of legal battle. (We won by the way)

Over the next few weeks we will be reviewing the battle against SAB on our website. So come back soon.