FY

“I think you must learn – if you’re in any filmmaking – you must respect the single frame. And there are twenty-four of those per second. If you don’t respect that single frame you’re in the same boat with a writer who does not respect a sentence or a phrase or a single letter or whatever. You have to find the smallest unit and you have to love it and believe that one will make a difference. One frame to me will make the difference between whether the thing’s funny or not.”

— Chuck Jones

I work as a trademark paralegal whose firm represents clients who sometimes sends out cease and desist letters like the one Ashley writes about. while it is true that the recipient of the threat in and of itself might not represent a terrible infringement of the complainant’s mark, the thinking generally is that if you tolerate one here or one there, over time it accumulates so that a future defendant will argue, “Well, Neiman Marcus apparently can coexist with A, B and C, so they can coexist with us too.”

As for the tone of their letter, yes, the idea is to try to be a bit intimidating. It’s really a bluff, hoping the recipient will be cowed by it. However, if the recipient of the letter replies, explaining the difficulty of changing the name, and agreeing to cooperate in return for time and/or a little financial compensation to change the name, the complainer will generally go along with it.

In the case of the shelter, I have no doubt that if they responded to Neiman requesting say 6 months to change their name that Neiman would give them the six months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Bookstore_Cooperative