Comment by IdeaHamster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IdeaHamster | Hacker News Reader

So, from the article, a short piece of a clip was removed when it was posted on Comedy Central's website. In the removed piece, one of the character's mentions the "eyePhone".

However, as spoken "eyePhone" isn't really any different than "iPhone", and "iPhone" is a registered trademark of Apple. Trademarks are interesting beasts. There is no "fair use" of trademarks for parody (hence, why the Looney Toons always got "Acme" brand products), and you cannot choose to not enforce trademark.

So, more than likely, what happened here is that someone said "(eye|i)Phone", Apple's lawyers heard about it, trademark law says it's the job of Apple (and its lawyers) to prevent trademark dilution, so the lawyers call up Comedy central and say: "Hey, you know that part where you say 'eyePhone', and you can't really tell if that's 'eyePhone' or 'iPhone'...could you just clip that out?"

...wait, I'm sorry...I forgot this was the internet. BOO! Bad Apple! Such an evil company that will censor our funnies and ruin the purity of our bodily fluids!

Your theory nicely rationalizes the removal.

Except that "eyePhone" is mentioned several times in the episode and it was not the problem. The problem was showing the zombies and the following announcement:

- "Introducing the all new eyePhone 2.0." - (the mob) "Yeah!"

Little bird tells me that painting "Momcorp" (with logo similar to Apple, with store similar to Apple, you get the point) users as mindless zombies ready to buy anything was the problem.

eyePhone was not a problem in the episode because of context, which is missing from the clip. In the interest of keeping the internet green, let me recycle what I wrote in the reddit discussion of this:

Spoiler alert. This post mentions elements of the episode that are not in the clip, and so could be mild spoilers for those who have not seen the episode.

There's no particular reason to believe Apple had anything to do with this. I'd guess it was initiated either by Comedy Central or by the Futurama producers, for comedic reasons.

One of the themes of the episode was to parody the iPhone, using a phone called the eyePhone. If you watch the episode, you'll note they are careful to make sure than when they introduce the eyePhone, you see the word eyePhone written, so you can tell they are saying "eyePhone", not "iPhone". Then when we see how the eyePhone is used, we see why it is called the eyePhone.

Having the viewer know that it is eyePhone, and it is installed in the eye, is important. It's what makes the difference between a funny parody and a dumb heavy handed commentary.

In the original clip, note that there is no place that the word eyePhone is written, and there's nothing that indicates the phone is installed in the eye. Someone seeing that clip who has NOT seen the episode therefore might think they are saying iPhone, and think its a dumb heavy handed clumsy commentary, and be disinclined to watch the episode.

Hence, they edit the clip to take out that element. Now the clip shows the viewer only things that are understandable and funny without needing context from earlier in the episode. The clip thus has a chance of fulfilling its intended function of getting people to watch the new Futurama episodes.

Apple does sell the full episode on iTunes.

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