Chelsea Green is getting a fresh start with the new name of her podcast.
Chelsea Green addressed the recent cease and desist order she received that resulted in changing the name of her podcast. Originally named ‘50 Shades Of Green’, Chelsea changed the name of the show to ‘Green With Envy’ after revealing she was issued the order last week. Green went into detail about the process of picking the original name and the response she received, as well as the action she took to put the issue to bed.
“This week was a doozy. On Tuesday, I received a surprising email from my lawyer, and the email read, ‘Chelsea, much to our surprise, we’ve received the attached cease and desist letter concerning your use of ‘50 Shades Of Green’ trademark for your podcast and merchandise. As you will note from this letter, the complaining party is the owner of 50 Shades Of Grey, the brand. My gut tells me you’re not going to win and they certainly have deep pockets to fight this.’
Chelsea said she couldn’t believe that the real 50 Shades Of Grey cared that much about her and her show, but then she went into the name of the show itself. Green says they went through many different options, about 20 different options before landing on the original name.
“We finally ended up on ‘50 Shades Of Green’ for a few different reasons. The first reason was ‘Hot Mess’ was extremely oversaturated in the podcast world. There were so many different variations of ‘Hot Mess’ out there as well as with trademarks, so that was kind of tough. So we moved on to other options with ‘Green’ in it. The reason we chose ‘50 Shades Of Green’ wasn’t because there’s no podcast with the name, actually it was the opposite. It was because there was two or three [shows], which meant that if they were coexisting, then—cohabitating, coinciding, whatever you want to say—in theory, we should be able to coexist with them. The name also wasn’t oversaturated in the—how do I say this—there were a few podcasts with that name, but they were all different topics being discussed, nothing to do with wrestling, nothing to do with somebody’s last name being ‘Green’.
“Nobody had the trademarks to ‘50 Shades Of Green’ for podcasting or for merchandise, so we thought that was great, you know? What we didn’t consider was that a massive movie and book franchise would care about a tiny little podcast hosted by a wrestler. Joke’s on us.”
Green went on to explain that they thought the show fell under the parody law [fair use of a work as an imitation] but they failed to meet the criteria because they weren’t actually parodying the book series. Green recited the cease and desist addressed to her attorney [‘Gimmick Attorney’ Michael Dockins] that stated ‘a bunch of lawyer-y shit’ before explaining that Green needed to abandon the trademark and name of the show so that they “avoid confusion” in the market. Green says she could fight it or ignore it, but she just didn’t want to deal with a huge issue like that, so she just changed the name.
“50 Shades is so last week. We are now ‘Green With Envy’ and I’m loving it. We have a fresh start people,” Green said. “That’s good, right? That’s what I’m telling myself.”
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