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Tours de Farce: There’s No Business Like Sue Business
First of all, nothing could be farther from the truth. True, we do have a top-notch, expert legal team ready to defend our good name at the drop of a hat. But that’s business in the new millennium. You have to jump out there and protect what’s yours. And when someone steals from you, or slanders you or libels you, you have to rise to the challenge and carve them a new one. So, you see, it’s just business.
Of course, our business is tour data, like listing new dates for Skinny Puppy, or posting the latest routings for John Fogerty and theSTART. Unfortunately, there are some people in this world who are jealous of our success, and they mean to take us down anyway possible. Thankfully, we have 1,948 Harvard-spawned lawyers standing by to chew them up and spit them out. But that shouldn’t worry you. It’s just business.
It’s a doggy dog world out there, survival of the fattest and all that stuff, and if you can’t stand the heat, then it’s time to douse the smoke where there’s fire in the kitchen. Sometimes you have to sue somebody for copyright infringement. Others you might have to sue for trademark infractions. And sometimes, you just have to sue them when they look at you funny. But that comes with the territory when you’re compiling concert schedules for Yanni, Toby Keith and Van Halen. That’s business.
We reiterate. We do not launch frivolous lawsuits. Every lawsuit we’ve filed has good, solid legal precedent. Whether we’re suing some kid in Omaha for copying our tour dates for Usher and distributing them on the Web, or we’re filing papers against some grandmother in Baton Rouge because her daughter’s kid used her computer to illicitly distribute the dates for Norah Jones and MxPx on Kazaa, we’re not doing this out of any deep, personal conviction. We’re not suing all these people, which, at last count numbered somewhere around 1,827,471 men, women and children, because we want to. Oh, no, we’d never do that.
We just like to think of it as giving them the business.