Crocodiles are not only found in zoos or in Florida. Neumarkt lawyer Geedo Paprotta has unearthed curious cases in German courts in which the powerful animal played a special role.
Big, green, with a mouth full of teeth – what is it? A crocodile. As a child I might have called it a T-Rex. But anyone who describes them as green monsters today is a fossil themselves. Everyone knows by now that the T-Rex was probably densely feathered and highly social.
If you want something scary, you should stick to crocodiles. But here too, the really nasty crocodiles have a different name, namely alligator. At least one thing can be said about the latter: they actually have a kind of green tone and are really dangerous. But where do you find them? On the Mississippi – or in Darmstadt.
The lizard brood was on trial: A man ran an alligator farm and offered tours of the enclosures. In fact, there was never a drop in visitors, at least no one ended up in the scaly, armored bellies of the alligators. Nevertheless, the local authorities did not trust the beasts and imposed various restrictions on visitors.
True to the motto “they don’t bite, they just want to play”, Crocodile Dundee from Darmstadt went to the administrative court and touted the peaceful nature of his animals.
But the judges probably had relevant images from nature documentaries in mind and found that the officially prescribed safety concept, which limited physical contact between visitors and the animals to adults, was not a bad idea (case no. 4B 2217/17).
Another world-famous crocodile is keen to make skin contact: the “Lacoste” logo. Anyone who wears a pangolin like this on their shirt, bag or shoe is confidently expressing that they don’t buy their clothes from discount stores. This made clothing designers all the more irritated when another crocodile tried to invade their hunting grounds.
The said beast came from Poland, called itself “Kajman” and was to be registered as a word-image trademark with the European Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market. The scale monsters wrestled with each other in an epic battle before the Court of Justice of the European Union until the court ruled: If you have a crocodile stuck on your tailcoat, everyone thinks of “Lacoste”. Other crocodiles are cheap imitations and should be banned because they deceive consumers (case number T-364/13).
Sometimes you wish you had such a teeth-baring monster by your side. For example, when you open your email inbox and it’s full of offers for diet pills and sexual enhancers. Spam! A clever law firm offered its clients a vicious business model: the “spam crocodile”. It basically devours annoying spam mail by issuing warnings to the authors, collecting hefty contractual penalties and taking the monsters to court.
Everything is free for the customer! All they have to do is hand over everything the spammers have to pay to the lawyers. However, the business model was banned by the Berlin Regional Court because the judges found that these lawyers are just like all crocodiles, they only think about eating. Here one rip-off scheme is simply replaced by another (case no. 15 O 6/16).
Geedo Paprotta is a lawyer. In his weekly column he takes up curious facts from his everyday life. Photo: Paprotta
