Everyone wants to show their support for their home team in their own way. For some of us, who live in the same city as the Cubs, we prefer to simply wear paper bag headwear during the post-season. For others, like the racy ladies of Kansas City, a pair of lovely blue panties emblazoned with a hand-drawn Royals logo is just the thing. After all, this is America, and if you want to wear your team pride on your ladyparts, you have a God-given right to do so.
Unless the Department of Homeland Security thinks you shouldn’t. And then, they’ll conduct an armed panty raid (literally) at the direction of Major League Baseball. Because if there’s anything we need the Department of Homeland Security focusing on right now, it’s what it says on your ass under your pants.
Homeland Security agents visited the Crossroads store and confiscated the few dozen pairs of underwear, printed in Kansas City by Lindquist Press.
“They came in and there were two guys” Honig said. “I asked one of them what size he needed and he showed me a badge and took me outside. They told me they were from Homeland Security and we were violating copyright laws.”
She thought that since the underwear featured her hand-drawn design that she was safe. But the officers explained that by connecting the “K” and the “C,” she infringed on major league baseball copyright. (The officials involved could not be immediately reached for comment.)
They placed the underwear in an official Homeland Security bag and had Honig sign a statement saying she wouldn’t use the logo.
Last I checked, DHS wasn’t listed as the enforcement arm for the US Patent and Trademark Office (or for the MLB for that matter), but given that the DHS now has a whopping $40 billion dollar budget that they aren’t spending on anything important, perhaps there was a switch they failed to inform the American people of. At any rate, I for one feel safer knowing that armed men in riot gear have confiscated all of the offending panties from Ms. Honig’s Birdies Panties Store, thus saving us all from the imminent threat of royal blue underwear.
Of course, technically speaking, copyright and trademark are civil matters, not criminal matters, and usually involve the FBI, not DHS. It probably shouldn’t even be an issue, but it definitely has nothing to do with DHS. That said, nothing in this story actually makes sense, so why should we start trying to shoehorn reason out of a government body?