Tactic 100. Story 5. Preemptive Cease and Desist. Not A Flamethrower. Pulled from the project. Spring 2022
I bought two domains for my eco-project at the same time: loraxproject.life and nottheloraxproject.life. I planned to exchange a series of funny emails with the Dr. Seuss legal team to launch the project. They were really nice so I decided to pull this tactic.
One of my preemptive moves was to ask them if the phrase: One Phish, Two Phish, Red Phish, Blue Phish was trademarked too.
This tactic was inspired by Elon Musk. I thought it was funny that Elon Musk changed the name of his flamethrower from Flamethrower to Not-A-Flamethrower to help out with the shipping logistics.
When I was a kid, I read The Lorax by Dr. Seuss and it inspired me to “speak for the trees” by caring for my planetary ecosystem. When I was fifteen years old (in 1985), I planned to call my future eco-project The Lorax Project. When I was getting things setup in in 2021, I discovered that “The Lorax” and “The Lorax Project” were covered by trademark protection.
I thought it would be funny to create a tactic called Preemptive Cease and Desist so I scripted a funny exchange with the Dr. Seuss legal team and use the exchange to launch my project. One of my moves was to use the band Phish (One Phish, Two Phish, Red Phish, Blue Phish) as a countermeasure.
I planned most of the steps below, but the DLA Piper team caught me off guard because they were really nice and cool. I didn’t feel good about using this tactic to launch the project, so I changed the name to Project Honeylight.
This tactic was launched prematurely when my developer pushed “publish” on the website before I was ready. I was surprised that the DLA Piper legal team had bots running to scour the internet for this trademark.
I wanted to mention that I bought the domains https://loraxproject.life and https://nottheloraxproject.life immediately after finding out that a trademark existed. I thought it would be funny to change the name of the project from Lorax to Project (trademarked) to Not The Lorax Project (potentially not trademarked) at the same time. I built both website simultaneously, but I took them both down at the same time.
I’m happy I didn’t deploy this tactic. The people at DLA Piper were cool and I didn’t want to entangle them in my launch sequence.
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Tactic Id | Tactic 100 |
| Story Id | Story 5 |
| Name | Preemptive Cease and Decist |
| Attributes | Word play |
| Date Completed | April 2022 (pulled) |
| Pattern | Inspired by Elon Musk |
| Emotion | Humor |
| Timing | Pulled |
