[Brewed by See-Dubya]

Coffee makes people uptight. I said as much here last June, and since then more evidence has come in that Starbucks makes people grumpy. Even really nice people.

Now, by way of Michael Bates, comes word that Starbucks is making more people grumpy. There’s a little mom&pop coffee shop in Tulsa called the “Double Shot“, and they’re getting hassled over the name. Seems Starbucks’ lawyers think they own the rights to the word “Double Shot”, which is funny because the only context I hear it in is “double shot of Glenfiddich, please!” (Which in Starbucks-speak would be a “venti” Glenfiddich.)

Anyway, yeah, cease and desist orders and whiny lawyers and the Double Shot people are telling Starbucks to put it in their frappucino and froth it. In fact they’re playing it up to the hilt and getting all kinds of free publicity out of Starbucks’ heavy-handed trigger-happy legal department. Hey, look, they’ve started a blog! and look, they just got a free commercial out of me!

I bring this up both to tweak Starbucks for being humorless pronks and also to point out that lawyers sometimes sit around with nothing to do and decide to make trouble to prove that they’re worth the salaries they pull down. With intellectual property stuff like this, they have a semi-legitimate concern that they could lose the exclusive rights to their property if they don’t enforce it (this is assuming that they actually owned it in the first place, which in this case I’m pretty sure they didn’t.) But in any big company, Legal ought to always sit down with Marketing and explain exactly what they’re going to do and why they want to do it. Hopefully some of the Creative types could have explained to them that their suit was counterproductive and would tend to make the Corporation look like bullies, and just invite more infringement along with the ridicule. So if you’re in Tulsa, go check out the Double Shot. And if you’re in California, go to Peets‘.

GODAWFUL LATE UPDATE: Starbucks makes Lyin’ Joe Wilson get cranky, and say all kinds of stupid things about other people’s private lives. Wuzzadem has an example.

–See Dub