Honest to God, some people need to be kicked repeatedly.

I don't know whether y'all remember this one, but back when the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire was coming out, a Winnipeg folk group called the Wyrd Sisters (I was going to link to their Web site, but you know what? Fuck 'em. If you want to look them up, go right ahead) sued the production over a scene involving a musical group called the Weird Sisters (which was what Rowling called a band in her book). They claimed, I guess, that the momentary appearance of the words "Weird Sisters" attached to a Harry Potter movie was going to overrun their years of work carefully making sure that when anyone hears the words "Wyrd/Weird Sisters," the first thing they think of is a folk band from Winnipeg.

I mean, when I say "Wyrd Sisters," you think of a folk band from Winnipeg, right?

Not a book by Terry Pratchett.

Not the Germanic Fates.

And certainly not anything ever written by that Richard-slandering playwright!

I mean, my God. They actually sued, on the grounds that a reference in a Harry Potter movie would confuse multitudes of people who had never heard of them before the lawsuit.

So the movie removed all (well, the one) reference to the band as "Weird Sisters." And the Winnipeg idiots continued to sue, on the grounds that irreparable harm had been done to their career by the publicity before the movie came out.

Because the publicity surrounding their, you know, behaving like fucking idiots didn't do them any harm at all.

( I might as well put the cut here, because this shit is long and crazy. )

On the band's Web site, there is a paranoid little rant about how abused they have been by the justice system and the media. Here's a thought: if I fling myself off a second-storey roof, have I been abused by the ground I land on?

I mean. My word.

Here's a music blogger who reports never having heard of the band before the Harry Potter fuss.

The funny thing is, the blogger is based out of Winnipeg, where the band is from.

If music bloggers in your own home town have never heard of you, then it's unlikely the movie can do you damage to the tune of $40 million. I'm just sayin'.

Well, snickerin'.

Edited to add: If the band leader had any sense of humour at all, she'd have made up posters when the movie came out that said "The Wyrd Sisters... as NOT seen in a major motion picture!" had a laugh, and moved on.

Honestly!

But now I am, once again, worried about the real band named Kowalski. Should this book ever be published I can only hope they turn out not to be batshit crazy!

Okay, now here is a situation in which someone might have had grounds for a lawsuit: over the weekend I caught an episode of P. Diddy's MTV show Making the Band 4. Which, okay, there is no band, it's a vocal group. And P. Diddy is a twit, but I saw a couple of episodes last season and most of the kids involved seemed like nice youngsters so I got interested in their fates. I found the show by accident but I seem to be watching it on purpose.

This season seems to involve the boys' vocal group from last season making a record at the same time as the girls from the previous season (Danity Kane? Apparently their debut went platinum? And they seem like nice kids too?) as well as Donnie, the dancing-challenged but likable white boy who didn't make the vocal group last season but was given a solo contract.

That's really all the background anyone needs. The music is bad and Puffy is painful, but the kids are sweet. And apparently CTV is a few episodes behind MTV in broadcasting the show. This is important. So on Saturday when I noticed I was up much too late and decided to see what was happening, I found that... well, the boys' group apparently didn't have a name yet when they did their first gig and everything. I missed the episode where they explained that the boys' group didn't have a name yet, so all I saw was that the three acts were being referred to as Donnie Whateverhislastnameis, Danity Kane, and...

...I can hardly type this...

...The Band.

Yes.

The Band.

And when I stopped gaping, and then laughing, all I could think to ask was, "Which of them gets to be Levon?"

Now that would be a lawsuit, and the reason that would be a lawsuit, Wyrd Sisters, is because that would be a case of an actual real musical group trying to co-opt the name of another actual real musical group--which in this case people have actually heard of.

Heh.

Luckily for my brain, it was in fact a misguided placeholder and they have a name of their own now. But. Heh.

Okay, fine. I over-reacted to the whole Wyrd Sisters thing. Mind you, I think they (or rather the band leader) overreacted themselves but that hardly excuses me.

If the movie company had truly intended to record a soundtrack album by "The Weird Sisters" as part of the Goblet Of Fire promotion, then the band would be right to have a problem with it. I mean, I never heard of such a thing, but that doesn't mean it wasn't planned. That would have been a legitimate problem. (Edited to add: The soundtrack with bonus tracks includes three songs by "The Weird Sisters." Honestly, that might be worth fussing over. But not burn-all-DVDs worth. Again, you have to consider whether the people who buy the soundtrack are likely to encounter the folk group, or be confused. As I note below, the obvious core audience for the band is middle-aged feminist hardcore folkies. The vast majority of Harry Potter fans will never, ever run into them. I only ever heard of them myself before the lawsuit because of a reference in a mystery novel by Gail Bowen, a middle-aged feminist from the Prairies.)

But just using the same name for a band that turns up in a single scene in the movie? Come now. Even without the kafuffle, who really thought, given the size of the story they were trying to film, that the band was going to do more than play in a background of that one scene? Who thought they were going to be dragged to the front and fussed over? I mean, they're only a tiny element of the book, and the book have eleventy-billion pages. There's no way they were going to be a focal point of the movie.

Also, and this is what made me blow my stack earlier--the $40 million dollar amount I mentioned earlier? That seems to be the amount of punitive damages the Wyrd Sisters were seeking.

Why?

Even if the movie completely killed their career (and I stand by my earlier opinion that even if the Weird Sisters had been all over the movie, the effect on the folk group would have ended up negligible) how on earth could anyone claim that it was going to cost them $40 million in lost earnings, or anything like it? Who in Canadian music short of Celine Dion could ever dream of earning that much money as a musician in a lifetime of slogging?

That amount, if the media did not pull it out of its collective arse, is what makes the lawsuit frivolous and also look like an opportunistic cash grab. It makes them look stupid and greedy as well as humourless. Well, that and the wholly ridiculous demands that everyone in Canada be protected from the heinous Potter movie, including parts of the country where I am damned sure they aren't touring. Actually, owing to the magic of the Internet, this blog right here has regular readers in the UK and occasional hits from all over the world. The band has a Web site, accessible wherever the Internet it. We're probably lucky they didn't demand the movie be suppressed all over the world!

Which does not make me eager to rush out and give them a listen.

I missed it in the theatres, but Mr and Mrs Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, was on television last night. Just in case anyone out there thinks my recent interest in Shakespeare and English history means I have developed any sense (although my obsessive posts about these topics indicates plus ca change) I must report that I loved it. Yes, I don't normally do assassins or serial killers, but it wasn't like you could take this one seriously. And they seemed to be having so much fun.

Yeah, yeah, the movie being the prelude to coupledom and numerous beautiful children I suppose they should have looked like they were having fun.

Anyway. Definitely a couple of hours well-wasted.

Yet another Wyrd Sisters story.

Pullout quote:

"Consumers will assume that the smaller and less famous Canadian band is trying to take advantage of the Harry Potter fame by copying the Harry Potter band's name when in fact the reverse is true," Baryluk said in her statement of claim to the Federal Court of Canada in Toronto.

Okay, I have to assume she just put that badly. Because that sounds like she thinks the whole situation is something other than a not-very-surprising coincidence. (I mean! What else would you call a witch/wizard band? It'd be up there in my top three possibilities, right behind Eye Of Newt.)

I think I'm done now, unless something else really silly happens.