Toho Sues Subway For Godzilla Commercial
April 18th, 2008 by James
Toho believes the monster in the above commercial is an unauthorized copy of Godzilla, so they are suing its maker:
The Subway sandwich chain is being sued by Toho Co., the maker of Godzilla movies, for allegedly using the prehistoric monster without permission in TV commercials.
Subway “not only intentionally created a character that closely resembles Godzilla in its physical appearance, but placed the character in a setting, a Japanese city under attack, that is widely associated with Toho’s Godzilla films,” the movie maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles.
Subway never asked for Toho’s permission to use Godzilla in the commercials for its Five Dollar Footlong sandwich promotion, according to the complaint.
Do you think Toho is right in claiming that this is willful infringement?
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lol, the company wants all the money it can get towards a franchise they created
To me it is more like a spoof instead of a rip-off. I am not sure whether any copyright is infringed.
If you have godzilla under contract, why do you have to sue? Why can’t you send him over to wreck some havoc?
LOL Sueing for an obvious parody. I guess TOHO isn’t doing so well.
thats right, parody is an actual loophole in the legal system that allows you to get away with that.
subway is not at fault because it’s a parody.
also using copy written material for “educational” purposes is not liable.
theres one other one but i can’t remember what it was.
Fair Use
I’ll be surprised if they win. A lot of people have used Godzilla lookalikes in many things and never gotten sued.
This comes as a surprise….TOHO must be desperate for some money hahahaha.
Ridiculous.
People who sue for stuff like this should be fined.
Ok first of all it isn’t even Subways fault. The only ones that are at any fault is the ones making the commercials. And for now just to be sueing about this, I mean hello Toho why don’t you start watching more tv and see all the other crap first before going out on others. I mean what the heck?
So ridiculous, your not the only one who gets these problems.
Reminds of the advert for ChewIt’s from the UK back in the late 80’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7YOXn32nmM
For those of you that think that there is no problem with subway highjacking godzilla to basically endorse their own product, would you feel the same if burgur king dressed someone up like ronald mcdonald and had him endorsing burger king. This is not by any means fair use, fair use relates to when copyrighted material is used in an educational manner, an example of this would be if your local news were to do a segment on the upcomming godzilla movie and they showed an image of godzilla to acompany the story. Likewise this falls quite short of the qualifications to be considered parody. What we are dealing with is an advertisement which delibratly portrays godzilla doing what godzilla allways does (destroying a japanese city) just before he stops to endorse a subway product. Are you kidding me peaple? if this isnt copyright infringement then what is?