I’ve read so much about what’s legal and what’s not that you’d think I would be an expert in this but for some reason I still manage to come up with questions. –Not so much about what to do but why? How does that ruling make sense when this is true?
I recently had to get some medication and found on the box of a generic brand the phrase “compared to name brand.” All the active ingredients seemed to be the same and its purpose was identical. But the price was about 70% the cost of the name brand. Before the pharmacist could say, “Are you finding everything alright?” it occurred to me what if this sort of thing was on the labels of our music and movies. All the songs were sung by a voice that sounds like Britney Spears and the instruments were playing what sounded like the same song. Could they put on the label “compared to Britney Spears” and get away with it? Or, what if the story line and sequential shots were almost identical to the movie “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”? The faces kind of look like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie but they’re not. Could they put on the label “compared to Mr. & Mrs. Smith”? For some reason it works in the Rx industry and I don’t see the generic brands getting yanked into litigation. One could argue that the generic brands are piggy backing on the advertisements of the name brands. “This medicine sitting right next to this one says it is compared to the same brand that we saw on TV, Martha.”
The real argument here is what if the off brand CD and DVD actually happen to be better. Wow, I think she sounds better then Britney Spears. That may not be Brad and Angelina but they sure make a better Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Of course we can never know who those people are because the price of the CD & DVD sells would have to be raised. Would that be a bad thing? After all celeberties are usually over paid anyway, right?
