Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Chuck Norris sues to keep the "Truth" from getting out.

I love it when a book that I bought might become a collector's item.

According to CNN, Chuck Norris is suing the Penguin Group and Ian Spector of a recent book collecting certain "truths" about the actor that made the rounds on the Internet.

Yes, I did buy this book (Don't look at me that way! I bought it at Barnes & Noble with a 25% off coupon on top of my member discount. It came out that they almost paid ME to buy the book.) because I though some of the entries were funny. But reading the book (one night, the night I bought it, pretty much in one sitting. It is not a deep book), I knew that this lawsuit was bound to happen.

By now, everybody out there must have seen the original website or got an e-mail with the sayings, right? The stuff like "Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he never cries." and "The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain"? The book has a lot of witty ones like that. But it also has a lot of crude, off-color ones as well.  So many that were so raunchy that I thought to myself "No way a Republican like Chuck Norris would find that acceptable".

So, I knew a lawsuit was coming. Actually, I though there would be many. One from Chuck Norris, and loads from the posters who submitted the pithy sayings Spector used for his book. After all, even though he is listed as the author, the book is just a compilation of reader submissions to his website.

I am of two minds on this. First, Chuck Norris has gotten a bit of a career resurgence from this phenomenon. I don't believe that it's a coincidence that he started getting soda and car commercials and began being interviewed about his political views so soon after this website started. It created a buzz that he used to his advantage.

On the other hand, some of the entries are crude. Crude doesn't automatically mean funny. Crude can be funny, but it follows the same rules as anything else that is funny. The crudest entries here are going more for shock value than a witty mocking of Chuck's tough guy persona.

Regardless, if I was a man in Chuck Norris' position, I wouldn't be comfortable having some of those crude "truths" in a book, even if I knew they were in jest.

But does he have the right to sue? On the basis of what's written, probably not. He gets off a lot easier than Jerry Falwell did in Hustler and Larry Flint won against Falwell's lawsuit. But the case seems to be about the use of his name and image (both which, as you can imagine, is all over the book) without hios permission. That he might have more of a leg to stand on, I say having nary a law degree.

But oone of the things he is asking for is for publication to be ceased and all copies being recalled. Some sort of settlement is more likely, but if a recall does happen, my copy might be hitting eBay.  



1 comment:

  1. Fact: Chuck Norris has no sense of humor.

    ReplyDelete