One thing I've learned in the five months or so since I started this blog is that every once in awhile there are days where you come across a story that is perfect to blog about and then there are days where you come across a story that is PERFECT to blog about.
Jason Whitlock wrote a column in today's KC Star about a lawsuit that KU has brought up against
Joe-College.com, a company that specializes in novelty t-shirts. The website has a wide variety of t-shirts pertaining to the University of Kansas athletic teams. Some lampoon the school and others are typical fanboy KU shirts. The problem the university has is the website doesn't have a license and is profiting from using words such as "Kansas" and "Hawk."
Today
a jury awarded the university $127,000, or about a fourth of what the Beakers were seeking. All in all this was a horrible move by the university to push this thing as far as they did. Think about it, even though Joe-College.com was clearly illegally benefiting from the university's image what did it matter? Was there really any harm done to the school? Who was this private businessman hurting? Maybe Mark Mangino's Golden Corral bills were even larger than we thought.
What ended up happening was KU more than likely just crushed a private local business and gained essentially nothing in the process (do you think $127,000 is really going to help the school that much?). That's gonna be a big hit to the ol' rep. KU officials didn't help matters by making outrageous statements in court such as claiming to own the color blue. I'm not joking, read the column. Personally, I'm just glad they don't have the market cornered on Burnt Sienna.
And what it leads to is respected sports columnists referring to your actions as "un-American" which is something we all knew anyways. In fact, I'd take it a step further and say that the university is an enormous threat to almost all of America's most fundamental institutions and needs to be shut down immediately. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that and the National Guard, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy or better yet all of them needs to step in and stop things before another hardworking American everyman is put out of business.
Save America. Stop KU.
