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In this week's episode Nasir and Matt discuss the Dumb Starbucksstore that surfaced in Los Angeles, an NFL player voiding his contract for more guaranteed money, and employees at Starbucks questioning a disabled veteran with a service dog. They also welcome special guest Reggie Lal to discuss Ponzi schemesin real estate investing. Nasir and Matt then answer questions concerning when to get a nondisclosure agreement signed, whether a closed business can be sued, and how to handle a competitor slashing prices. Go buy some @dumbstarbucks before dumb lawyers get to it pic.twitter.com/67E2zq0myf — Mark McCune (@MarkMcCune) February 8, 2014 Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business! This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: Thanks for joining us this week again! This is where we cover business legal news and answer some of your business legal questions. What do we have first up today? I think we have our coffee/Starbucks episode. MATT: Yeah, this is heavily Starbucks episode. We’re going to book in today’s episode of Starbucks stories, but I’m sure many of you probably saw this first one and maybe some of you know the full story and some of you don’t. For those that don’t, there’s a coffee shop in LA that opened up called Dumb Starbucks. It just mirrored a normal Starbucks but just had the word “dumb” in front of everything. The name, every single drink just had the word “dumb” in front of it. They even have the same Starbucks logo with just “dumb” in front of Starbucks. It was pretty much an exact mirror of a Starbucks. For those of you that don’t know, basically, it was kind of a PR stunt done by this guy. Who was it? Nathan Fielder. He has a show on Comedy Central. Actually, he did some pretty funny stuff last year. I saw some of his show. NASIR: I didn’t even know he was famous yet. I thought it was just he kind of just came out of nowhere. MATT: Well, I hate to bring it up this early in the show, but the first episode I saw, he just does these crazy things. He went into a pizza place and he basically tries to do fake ways to generate more business and he offered a free pizza if you didn’t get your pizza within 30 minutes like the old Domino’s way. but the free pizza, he would actually deliver, these were like the size of a circle you would make with your hand – like, a very small circle. NASIR: Yeah, because he didn’t specify what size. MATT: Right, exactly. It’s stuff like that. This story got a lot of press and people were asking about, “Is this legal?” Dumb Starbucks came out – and, I guess, more so Nathan – he said, “It’s illegal because it’s a parody.” And so, there are use under the fair use that allow this to happen, but I don’t know if you know about the story or what your take is on this. NASIR: When I first saw it, I assumed – and I think I’m correct on this – that whoever was behind this, they went through great trouble to first determine whether or not they were going to get away with it. I assume some attorney definitely advised him as to how to proceed, but I do see some loopholes. Fair use under parody is a very difficult thing to do because you have to take each case specifically because – think about it this way – if you’re going to parody anything, you have to use the original mark. No matter what, you’re going to be actually using or infringing upon a trademark. And so, therefore, you have to make sure that not only does it serve its purpose – meaning it also has to be comedic, but also done in a way that is not commercial in nature. And so, the one concern I had with this is that, on Saturday and Sunday, apparently, he was giving out coffee – lines out the door, three-hour or four-hour wait – but he also had prices so it’s unclear whether he was actually selling the coffee as well because, if he’s selling the coffee, how can you argue it’s a parody because then you’re almost in the business of selling coffee which is the exact thing that t...