Hasta La Ideas

After several months of ridicule by the press and you esteemed members of the internet, Jeff Koons‘ lawyers have backed down and dropped the intellectual property complaints they’d filed back in December against both the San Francisco-based store/gallery Park Life and Canadian manufacturer Imm-Living. To recap, the issue began back in December, when both parties received cease-and-desist letters, telling them to stop making and selling bookends in the shape of a balloon animal dog. Koons’ lawyers argued that the product was much too close to the artist’s famous piece, “Balloon Dog,” a large, shiny, metallic sculpture that has appeared in museums and galleries around the world. The news about the cease-and-desist traveled quickly, very little of taking sides with Koons’ position of intellectual property theft, given the artist’s own history of “borrowing.” Park Life, in particular, kept the story entertaining, recently filing their own, very funny complaint in court against Koons and making statements like “So going forward, just so you know; Jeff Koons owns all likenesses of balloon dogs.” Now it’s apparently all come to an end, as the NY Times reports that both parties received letters from Koons’ lawyers last last week, “saying that it would not pursue the intellectual property claims, as long as Imm-Living didn’t try to tie Mr. Koons to the bookends.”

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