iFart Mobile creator shocked – shocked! – at audacity of competition

It’s rare for a genius to truly get satisfaction in his own time. Picasso was unappreciated until much later in life and Van Gogh died before receiving the notoriety he deserved. And so we meet Joel Comm, creator of iFart Mobile, who finds himself so decidedly under-appreciated and misrepresented in the realm fart programs for the iPhone that he is suing his closest competitor, Pull My Finger.

Mr. Comm, a well known web-marketer, describes how the company that makes Pull My Finger, Air-o-matic, asked for $50,000 for using the tagline “Pull my finger!” in some of his PR materials and on a YouTube video representing iFart Mobile. Long story short, now Comm is asking a judge to find that “pull my finger” is part of public domain, essentially shutting Air-o-Matic up with the legal system. His court documents are here.

Now I’m no lawyer, but this whole thing sounds like people pissing – or farting – into the wind. “Pull my finger” is pretty common and I’m fairly certain it’s been used before in marketing, if only for some gross-out junk from the 1980s. As for iFart and Comm, well, homeboy got lucky. The Orlando Sentinel and a few other papers wrote about Comm and iFart, pointing out that Comm basically saw a hole and filled it. I’m of two minds when it comes to applications like iFart – it dumbs down the app store yet proves that you can make big money with the right idea – but this is kids in a slap fight.