Ben & Jerry’s wins round in X-rated porn fight
The pornographic exploits of “Ben & Cherry” in titles such as “Boston Cream Thighs,” “Peanut Butter D-Cups” and “Chocolate Fudge Babes” will temporarily simmer down following a court order won by similarly named ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s.
The Vermont company, known for frozen treats such as Boston Cream Pie, Peanut Butter Cups and Chocolate Fudge Brownie, sued Caballero Video this week and persuaded a federal judge in Manhattan to block the porn producer from marketing or selling Ben & Jerry-esque titles for now.
This, of course, is the same sweets company that offers flavors such as Cherry Garcia, Imagine Whirled Peace, Phish Food and more word and name-play options. And we’d be remiss if we forgot Ben & Jerry’s saucier choices, such as Karamel Sutra and Schweddy Balls.
Some of the ice cream maker’s containers have been emblazoned with the tagline “Size Matters.”
And when the company launched its Greek Frozen Yogurt this year, it also released a match-making app called “Wanna Spoon?” The app, which connects customers to Facebook friends who share profile features, issues the message “using a fancy algorithm, Ben & Jerry’s decided we’d make great spooning partners.”
Ben & Jerry’s, a subsidiary of Unilever, distributes its products around the world in supermarkets, convenience stores, Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Shops, restaurants and other venues. The company claims that Caballero didn’t have permission (not that they’d give it) to reference Ben & Jerry’s or its trademarked flavors.
So the North Hollywood DVD producer, known officially as Rodax Distributors Inc., must stop offering the 10 titles in its Ben & Cherry’s series in the interim and remove all online mention of the X-rated products, according to the ruling.
Caballero was also ordered to get rid of packaging that placed the grassy fields and puffy clouds often decorating Ben & Jerry’s containers alongside markedly less bucolic imagery of busty women.
That’s too bad for the porn industry, which rips off popular titles as often as it does bodices. Take “The XXXorcist,” “Pulp Friction,” “A Clockwork Orgy,” “Horat” and more.
The 2005 adult action-adventure flick “Pirates” – the priciest porn movie ever made at the time – is not so subtly based on the Hollywood blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
[For the record, 2:10 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said that “Pirates” was the priciest porn movie ever made. It was the most expensive porn film in history when it was produced in 2005.]
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