MediaFile

You’d think nothing could be cuter than a stuffed rabbit that comes to life to cheer up a lonely child. But Verizon Wireless rewarded the promoters of Velveteen Rabbit, the movie, with a not-so-cuddly lawsuit.

A representative for the mobile service said Verizon had nothing against children’s movies but it is taking issue with a Utah-based telemarketing company, which has apparently been calling cellphone users to advertise the movie.

Verizon said it filed a suit in the U.S. District Court in Trenton, New Jersey , alleging that Feature Films For Families Inc illegally used an auto-dialler for LA-based Family 1 Films. The suit says Verizon Wireless customers and employees received nearly 500,000 calls with a scripted promotion for the film over a 10-day period in February.

Is the movie industry so desperate for new viewers that it needs to pester phone users about children’s movies? You’d think that was the preserve of companies who feel the need to tell you what to do if your car warranty is about to expire.

A media representative for Feature Films For Families Inc was not immediately available for comment.

Maybe the real headline should be, “Financial Times finds old way to save newspapers.” It’s called the lawsuit. As reported by Cityfile:

You know we’re in a deep recession when even billionaire financiers can’t afford to pay for subscriptions to the Financial Times. In what will go down as one of the more bizarre (and unintentionally hilarious) lawsuits we’ve seen in quite some time, the newspaper filed a lawsuit against Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group on Wednesday for sharing an FT username and password instead of setting up separate accounts for its employees. Yes, an unknown “senior employee” at the colossal private equity firm “authorized the initiation and repeated renewal of an individual, personal subscription to FT.com” and then distributed the login details to company employees so they could all join in on the fun. (The court documents list the username as “theblackstonegroup” and the password as “blackstone,” although FT says it has since “disabled the credentials to mitigate damages.”)

The New York Post gives us the background on why the situation is absurd on its face: