Trademarking Jesus: Is Jesus trademarkable? How about the phrase "Jesus is (fill in the blank)"? Carrie at Stay Free! points out an interesting tradmark dispute between the maker of "Jesus is my homeboy" t-shirts and a parody of it--"Jesus is a kike."--by Daniel Sieradski, creator of Orthodox Anarchist ("the adventures of an american jewish radical in israel") and Jewschool.com. The homeboy camp accuses the, um, other camp of trademark infringement in a letter from its laywer. A sample of his interesting exchange with "homeboy" lawyer Joseph Sofio:

The shirt was conceived shortly after the release of The Passion Of The Christ and is offered as social commentary on the nature of antisemitism and the irony inherent within the historical persecution of Jewish people on the part of Christian people who obviously have lost sight of the fact that Jesus himself was a Jewish person. Ie., a Christian person who might refer to a Jewish person as a "kike" is oblivious to the fact that Jesus himself was also a "kike." I do not see how making this point harms the reputation of Teenage Millionaire and it is doubtful that a court will either.

---snip---

I'd also like to add that I find the concept of trademarking and copyrighting a religious icon to be incredibly distasteful and, frankly, unethical. If Jesus had an estate to represent his interests, your client would likely have never been able to copyright or trademark his likeness to begin with...

---snip---

...the t-shirts are manufactured by a print-on-demand service and therefore there is a) no inventory, b) I earn roughly $3 per shirt (whereas Cafepress takes the vast majority of earnings for their part in manufacturing and distribution), and c) I haven't sold more than a dozen of them. If you're really intent on taking me to court for $36, be my guest. It's probable that you will lose the case, but if by some miracle of God you don't, you ain't gonna get nothin' outta me anyway except to further impoverish the impoverished which, I must say, would be an incredibly un-Christian action on your client's part.

In such a scenario I can only wonder really, what would Jesus do?

I think he'd let it go.