Comedy duo threatened by Serial producers

Two comedy writers have been threatened with legal action from the producers of hit podcast Serial – in a dispute over the trademark on the letter 'S'.

Simeon Courtie and Hal Stewart had set up a parody podcast called Serial Box – but were hit by a missive from across the Atlantic before a single episode had aired.

The production company This American Life claimed that the Brits had breached the trademark on their icon – a letter S on top of an representation of a pack of cards.

The parodists hit back, saying: 'Forget it. You can't seriously claim to own the letter S'.

But it turns out they did... at least in that style.

The threat of legal action came from Serial's community editor Kristen Taylor, who emailed to say: 'The logo for your comedy podcast is too close to ours. I really don't want to bring our legal into this, so will you update it please within two days?'

When challenged over whether they could own the letter 'S', she added: 'That particular "S" (the way it looks, the approximate shape, in that colour etc), that's all trademarked.

'Some of the parody and fan podcasts play on the card stack theme in clever ways. So: different font colour, no "S" on the card stack and no SERIAL on the laid-out card stack.'

Stewart said: 'We were really proud of what we'd created and confident it would be popular worldwide – but even we were surprised to hear from the makers of 'Serial' so quickly.

Courtie, a former CBBC presenter, added: 'We'd made it very clear that ours was a parody by putting the word "box" under the letter S and adding the tagline - "one story investigated badly" .

And although they said they wanted to challenge Serial's claim, Courtie conceded: 'Reluctantly we were forced to agree - they did in fact own the letter S and we should all be very grateful when we use it.'

Serial Box is available now on podcast platforms including iTunes.

The second series of Serial, hosted by Sarah Koning and investigating the case of American soldier Bowe Bergdahl, held hostage by the Taliban for five years, is just coming to an end, with a third in the pipeline.

Published: 28 Mar 2016