The Associated Press
byCharlie Nash19 Dec 20170
Ashley Madison, the hookup service for cheating partners, has threatened to sue competitor CasualX over alleged similarities in their marketing.
According to Metro, Ashley Madison’s parent company Ruby Life is “concerned” over the similarities between the two services’ marketing and branding.
“The cheating website is concerned that CasualX, which markets itself as ‘the Tinder for casual sex’, advertises its services with the words ‘Life is boring. Desire a fling?’ Ashley Madison feels this is too similar to its own slogan: ‘Life is short. Have an affair,’” reported Metro on Monday. “It also called on CasualX to stop using a picture showing a masked woman pressing a finger to her lips, which is allegedly similar to an image used by Ruby Life.”
In a legal letter sent from Ruby Life to CasualX, the company claimed, “The main/memorable elements that will be remembered by any consumer would be flowing hair, a finger raised to the lips and the mask.”
“The only two differences in the slogans are the presence of the words ‘boring’ versus ‘short’ and ‘desire’ versus ‘have’. In fact, even I, being a trademark lawyer, made a mistake of replacing ‘fling’ with ‘affair’,” they continued.
In response, CasualX claimed Ruby Life’s demands were “unreasonable.”
“Our image and their trademark are quite different… Their trademark doesn’t have a mask, while our image has a mask,” they proclaimed. “Also, the woman on their trademark picture wears a wedding ring, which indicates that their service is for married people. The woman on our trademark doesn’t wear a wedding ring.”
“People can easily distinguish ‘Life is short, have an affair’ from ‘Life is boring, have a fling’,” a spokesman for the company concluded. “We need to spend a lot of efforts and time to reshape the branding awareness because the image has been featured on some big media sites and has been seen by many people… Also, our app was once featured by Apple in their trending list. If we change the image, we will have to create a new branding image for our potential customers.”
In 2015, the identities of 36 million Ashley Madison users were leaked following a hack, which also revealed 10,000 users with government email addresses.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.
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