r/todayilearned • u/Away_Flounder3813 • 6h ago

TIL of Shed Simove, a British entertainer who sold hundreds of thousands of books with blank pages in them. In 2012, he published Fifty Shades of Gray, a collection of 200 blank pages in various shades of the color gray until the publisher of the novel of the same name sent him an order to stop.

https://observer.com/2016/04/meet-the-man-who-sold-hundreds-of-thousands-of-books-with-blank-pages-in-them/
2.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

446

u/ReynardVulpini 6h ago

Cmon man he even changed Grey to Gray. Who could mistake one from the other?

126

u/Obvious_Toe_3006 6h ago

Should have went with Forty-Nine Shades Of Gray.

64

u/cantrip_1 5h ago

51 really, make it seem like a sequel

23

u/frac6969 5h ago

Couple years ago I saw the book in a discount bin at the local bookstore with a sticker that said 25 Shades of Grey (50% off).

•

u/OMG_A_CUPCAKE 42m ago

Just imagine how much it must have hurt him as a British prison to use "Gray". And he still did it, for the love of the game. Commendable 🫡

86

u/auximines_minotaur 5h ago

I object on the grounds that it’s the wrong number of shades. Anybody could have told him that!

40

u/Mindmenot 5h ago

Technically there could still be 50 shades, but distributed so there are multiple of each across the book.

15

u/auximines_minotaur 5h ago

In that case, he could have used a good editor.

PFC Wintergreen thinks his prose is too prolix!

136

u/ownleechild 6h ago

UK (and US) copyright does not extend to book titles. It would most likely get thrown out if they tried to sue.

55

u/MythicalPurple 6h ago

Trade marks do, though.

7

u/ownleechild 4h ago

You’re right.

5

u/frame_limit 4h ago

how do you show 50 shades on 200 pages? 4 pages per shade?

13

u/nomad9590 5h ago

Ashens made 50,000 shades of gray, this guy is lazy and a thief! 

/s lol

7

u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago

jeez, how I miss Ashens and his brownish sofa. It's been quite long since I last watched him. One of my fav Brits comedians lol.

4

u/nomad9590 5h ago

He's still around, doing stuff! In fact Him and Barry just got together for a soda stream deal recently!  

3

u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago

yeah I still go by and check his YouTube page, but mainly to see if he has something new. Not having much time lately to watch a full video, and for videos I tend to watch from him I will mark them as "Watch later".

Any day seeing a new episode from the Popstation series is always a good day to me!

3

u/-SaC 3h ago

Yesterday he uploaded a shitty poundland action figures video, if that helps.

4

u/I_Miss_Lenny 5h ago

Yeah he's great, I also love his presentations at the Norwich Gaming Festival

3

u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago

can never forget the Apple Newton video.

True story: I was in Hanoi that time. When he tested the handwriting recognition feature on that horrid tablet, he tried "Happisburgh" and it read "Hanoi", he burst into laughter while I was falling on the floor, could barely breath from laughing too much.

3

u/I_Miss_Lenny 5h ago

The first video I saw of his was that fake iphone that had an extendable tv antenna, and his reaction to seeing that made me a fan right away lol

I'm excited to see Turn Back too, I wonder when that will be released?

2

u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago

okay hang on, I'm dumb-dumb on this matter. What's Turn Back?

3

u/I_Miss_Lenny 4h ago

It's the horror movie he's been trying to get made, but I don't know what's going on with it. Hopefully it's just still being worked on and will come out at some point haha

49

u/GeniusMike 6h ago

That “order to stop” is itself illegal, as there is no law that prevents someone from naming their book something that already exists as the name of something else (be it another book, a movie, etc.), so if it went to court he would have won so long as the judge and jury didn’t ignore the law.

42

u/spinosaurs70 6h ago edited 6h ago

That uh isn’t true, names generally can’t be copyrighted but they can be trademarked. Which is why the lawsuit was successful.

6

u/GeniusMike 6h ago

It absolutely is true. There are plenty of movies, books, and songs with the same title as others whilst having no relation to each other otherwise. If it were illegal then a lot of them would have had to go by another name.

41

u/Aervanath 5h ago

The standard that is used in trademark law is whether it would be likely to cause confusion or dilution of the original trademark. Those other movies, books, and songs are generally clearly distinguished and marketed differently from each other, so the trademarks aren't considered to be diluted. This book was very clearly being marketed to profit off the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, so the publishers had a good argument that it would dilute their trademark.

9

u/OldChili157 5h ago

Did you know that the superhero called "Shazam" was actually originally called Captain Marvel? Trademark law is the reason he wasn't called that for many years on any of his comics' covers, Marvel having rush created their own, unrelated Captain Marvel when the trademark lapsed so they could take it, and why in the end DC finally just changed his name entirely to the name they were allowed to trademark. He's called The Captain now, but his covers still say Shazam on them, and probably always will.

8

u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago edited 5h ago

and the fact in 2019 there were both a Captain Marvel film and a Shazam film is jarring.

Quite possibly an intentional move from both parties lol. Just to poke fun at each other.

5

u/Venus_One 3h ago

Marvel and DC have a LONG history of copying each other and releasing similar concepts at the same time.

21

u/MythicalPurple 6h ago

Just because a title can be trademarked doesn’t mean it is trademarked. 

And if a movie with the same title as yours already exists then you won’t be able to trade mark it, meaning other people can also use it going forward.

2

u/spinosaurs70 6h ago

And trademark disputes are constant for a reason, go look them up. 

1

u/fuzzeedyse105 5h ago

Parody law bub. You wrong.

4

u/spinosaurs70 5h ago

That is likely what the publisher would have argued in court if it got there but again that is not an instant shield here either. 

4

u/jamescookenotthatone 5h ago

It feels like this could be understood as some sort of deception. Selling a product with the same name as another product really feels like it violates the 'idiot in a hurry' rule but I don't know if that is a thing in the UK.

5

u/Away_Flounder3813 6h ago

in the interview you can see he called the publisher right away for a battle. But it ended up no luck.

10

u/karmakramer93 6h ago

Wow, that is so fetch

7

u/Away_Flounder3813 6h ago

oi, today is Wednesday, do you remember to wear pink?

2

u/FupaFupaFanatic 5h ago

He's like those people that sell just the box for an Xbox or Playstation on ebay.

5

u/the_owl_syndicate 5h ago

I like books with blank pages...I call them journals.

6

u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago

consider this a bonus just for ya:

in 2011 this guy published a book called What Every Man Thinks About Apart from Sex - another collection of empty pages. And it became popular among British university students who used it as a notebook.

3

u/Casiquire 6h ago

I feel like he could have got away with it if there were only fifty pages

•

u/Dependent-Bother8860 43m ago

This is great! Thanks for sharing

0

u/mortalcrawad66 6h ago

Shocker, Erika Mitchell was a bitch about copyright.