While 50 million users world wide may love the online game Moshi Monsters, it would appear that Lady Gaga is not one of them. Gaga flexed her legal muscle and has won an injunction against Mind Candy, the company behind Moshi Monsters, to stop their Gaga-inspired character Lady Goo Goo from releasing a single.
"The Moshi Dance" featured Lady Goo Goo singing lyrics like "my crazy outfits seem to shock” and “my stroller's pretty and my diapers are silk, I throw my toys out if I don't get my milk". The song's video had been uploaded to YouTube, but has since been taken down. Mind Candy had planned on releasing "The Moshi Dance" as a single on iTunes, but the injunction won by Lady Gaga has stopped this from happening, as it prevents “any musical work or video which purports to be performed by a character by the name of Lady Goo Goo, or which otherwise uses the name Lady Goo Goo or any variant thereon" from being created.
Mind Candy’s chief executive Michael Acton Smith told BBC News that it look as though Lady Goo Goo will have to be killed off from the game, which will obviously be sad for her Little Monsters who also play Moshi Monsters. Acton Smith also states that this this case set a “worrying precedent for other parody acts and tribute bands”, which is something Weird Al Yankovic found out earlier this year when he tried to release his “Perform This Way” parody of “Born This Way”, and Gaga requested he didn't release it. (She later changed her mind.)
However, it’s not just parody acts and tech start-ups that Gaga has gone after, as she threatened to take legal action against The Icecreamists for their Baby Gaga ice cream flavour, which was made from human breast milk. Back in March, Gaga’s people had apparently written a warning letter to The Icecreamists, but as the Guardian reports, the letter arrived at the Covent Garden store a week after the Westminster Council's food standards department had already cleared the shelves to test whether it met hygiene requirements. The owner of the Icecreamists shop in Covent Garden, Matt O'Connor, said that Gaga’s letter claimed a that the company was trying to "ride the coattails" of her reputation.
Is Gaga just super-fierce about protecting her image and brand name? Or is that she does she simply not have a sense of humour about herself?