Post by Jay Carroll on Jun 15, 2009 7:57:46 GMT -5
The problem I have with most people that make statements like this is that more often than not, you never planned on contributing to the World Wildlife Fund to begin with, nor knew of their existence before they forced Vince and Co. to have to change their name.
Basically, the World Wildlife Fund had taken Titan Sports to court in 1994 and argued sucessfully that there was some confusion, especially in the North American market, between the wrestling company and the nature association. (At this point, the World Wildlife Fund was known as the World Wildlife Fund for Nature outside of North America) The only place where Titan Sports actually was affected by this ruling was in North America, they could still use the WWF name, logo, and anything else associated with it (which is why the New Generation and old school WWF logos are permissable in WWE Video releases, while the barbed wire logo isn't). Titan Sports made the conscious decision to ignore this court ruling, so the World Wildliffe Fund did what was within their rights and got the rights to WWF.com, and also got the courts to force Vince and company to conform to the ruling.
So, if you want to be angry with someone, be angry with Vince for not obeying a court ruling. The only thing about the case that makes me mad nowadays is that the World Wildlife Fund went ahead and changed their North American name to World Wildlife Fund for Nature as well, which pretty much made the lawsuit a mute point.
Why couldn't the World Wrestling Federation just give the World Wildlife Fund money to change their name? You have to realize, the WWF initials that North American people(not just fans) associate with was wrestling. Hell, the non-wrestling public still has that mindset, and that was over 7 years ago. Granted, I got use to it, but the editing and name recognition and such is annoying. When I refer to anything in WWE history before 2002, I refer to it as WWF because thats the name I grew up with.
Just a thought.
Not trying to start an arguement, as I actually agree with the prevailing thought that the World Wildlife Fund pretty much are douchebags for forcing the WWE to change their name, only to make it a mute point by changing their name as well. I was only posting that whole thing to show where Vince himself was wrong.
Legitimately, for the people that honestly cared about such things, finding the difference between the two companies, and their websites, should have been easy. However, since people are assumed to be lazy and not bother to check these things, we have issues like this. Since the original lawsuit was filed in 1994, it can be presumed that Vince was too concerned about beating the steriods case held against him and Titan Sports to bother fending off the World Wildlife Fund, or to be bothered with offering them money to piss off, since his capital was already tied up in his court case and running the WWF. So Vince never offered them the money, they win the suit, Vince ignores said suit (all he really had to do was never change the WWF logo and everything would have been fine), the WWF sues Vince again and wins, and we all end up with blurry ass WWE Home Video releases (except in Europe, since they get Tagged Classics, which since they're issued by another company fall outside of the lawsuit. Check your favorite internet tape trader site for this.)