Spam, Spam, Spam, Lawyers, and Spam

Hormel has finally sued someone over the use of their trademarked name Spam as a term to describe unwanted email.

The first thing any judge who gets this case must ask Hormel to do is show any evidence that the population of canned meat buyers at all intersects with the population of Net users. Further, Hormel must show that buyers of its jellied ham by-product regularly confuse the substance with the annoying electronic messages they receive on their personal computing devices. Proof like encasing their laptops in biscuit dough and then baking them.

And a real forward thinker on the bench would note the way Hormel trades on the post-ironic hipness of Spam (the canned meat) clearly imparted by the email association and dismiss the suit outright.