Big Candy vs. Big Snowman
Today's deranged intellectual property suit pits the Pez Candy Co. against the Museum of Pez Memorabilia:
The legal broadside, which was filed in San Francisco last month, singles out a 7-foot-10 snowman, built especially for the museum, that has been recognized by the Guinness record keepers as the world's largest Pez dispenser. Pez seeks to have the snowman melted down.
And, says the museum's newly hired lawyer, the company is demanding that the museum's "curators," Gary Doss and wife Nancy Yarbrough Doss, turn over all profits from the Pez shrine's 14 years in business.
More details of the demands are here.
The museum began in 1995 as a computer shop, but in a familiar entrepreneurial experience a sideline became the profit center, as customers grew increasingly interested in the owners' Pez displays. Within a year the dispensers had taken over. When the snowman arrived in 2007, the trademark-sensitive Pezco protested the fact that the toy was dubbed the "world's biggest Pez dispenser." The owners gamely relabeled it the "world's biggest dispenser of Pez," but apparently that wasn't enough.
