The left boot is from H&M, and the skull pattern on it is created by Helena Lindholm och Nini Andersson and has been used on various items during 2006 & 2007. The boot on the right is from Wedins and showed up in their shops this April. H&M thinks that Wedins pattern is a direct copy of their own and sent warning letters to Wedins already back in April. Since they got no response on that, they went ahead and filed suit the 28th of July demanding among other things that all of the boots shall be destroyed.
Wedins response?: "It is not a copy. I think it's a bit stomach turning that H&M are filing suit when they are world famous for plagiarizing." said Mats Björkenfeldt, Wedins lawyer, to Resume.

Maaan, just as I thought the Vietnam Saatchi team had done an OK job with their limited stock options for Western Union, I find that Leo Burnett, Colombia, already did it for Davivienda Bank Money Transfer. Last year. Oh poo.

Well, it's still a pretty thrifty solution.

While not everything in black and white makes sense - that this ad is fake fake not paid for by Guiness is dead obvious on first viewing.

The recently much debated Red Cross (youth) campaign has been pulled after a discussion with Red Cross headquarters in Geneva last Thursday. You can see the previous posts here; Red Cross campaign compares Chinese human right violations to olympic sports (16th June 2008) and a follow-up posted by the Red Cross Youth Sweden here; Red Cross Youth campaign for human rights (16th July 2008).

The campaign was first posted june 16th here on Adland, and like the (very similar) Amnesty International - After the Olympics campaign (posted 14th of March 2008) it didn't receive much attention at all, until about month later (12th July) when a new adgrunt - whole9yards - spotted something wrong with the images and left a comment about it. The photos in the campaign were shot in Nepal, and not in China.

The campaign then quickly took on a life on it's own, appearing in forums such as Anti-CNN.com, HK Yahoo.com, LKCN portal, bbs.hdpu.edu.cn, and even spawning facebook groups like this one*. For the extra curious who can't read chinese, you might find the worldlingo translator useful when trying to make out what is going on in some of those threads.

You remember the Adidas "vertical football" poster from from TBWA Japan in 2004, right? See BBC news - Japan turns football on its head. It won two Gold Lions at Cannes and picked up a Grand Clio back then and was written up pretty much everywhere. It was an ad that wowed people not just in the street below but pretty much all over the world - the vertical football later became vertical soccer when they played it on a poster in Times Square New York. Yeah, you remember it, I knew you would. To think that Carlsberg in Poland doesn't, as they just did the exact same thing. The balls of these guys aye? (Movies inside folks!)

New York Times blog finds that Coast Magazine is doing ye old 'sincerest form of flattery' thing regarding their own Spring 2007 cover of T (left). Coast Magazine (right) July 2007 is more tanned and less juicy tomato. Looks like it's missing the bacon too. How dull.

By now, you've heard:

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

(BBC)

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

(Wired)

I wonder how long it will take before some ad agencies ask Google turn over the IP#'s to try and prove that other ad agencies 'stole' their drumming Gorilla ad ideas in order to get even the tiniest whiff of a Grand Prix Lion. ;)