A Portland, Ore. man has filed a lawsuit for $832 million, saying he is tired of being mistaken for Michael Jordan, according to KGW-TV.

The television station's Web site says Allen Heckard filed the suit against His Airness and Nike founder Phil Knight on June 29 in county court, claiming to have been mistaken for the basketball legend nearly every day for the past 15 years.

Courtesy KGW.com

And he's tired of it.

"I'm constantly being accused of looking like Michael and it makes it very uncomfortable for me," Heckard reportedly said.

Heckard apparently is suing Jordan for defamation and permanent injury, emotional pain and suffering. He is suing Knight for defamation and permanent injury for promoting Jordan and making him one of the world's most famous athletes.

Here's a picture of him:

Wow...First off a normal person who knew anything about basketball could tell thats not Michael and then lol at him suing MJ when he wears his shoes and then suing Pat Knight for advertising MJ.....this guy does not deserve to live.

If we stretch and consider "lawsuits that should be barred by tort reform" to be a sport, here's a contender for one of the stupidest, or at least most annoying.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/eo/20060712/en_ ... hvBHNlYwM-

Nothing to do with sports, but seemed germaine to this thread.

That is not a dum lawsuit. He may be wrong but that is for a court to decide. However if he has a script with a boat called The Black Pearl and characters named Will Turner and Elizibeth and does have a apirate lead with similiar traits to the pirate lead in PoTC. If he did have a copyright with the US and if he did show them to an agency that worked with Dis-knee(sorry but there is profit to be had) I would say that is an extremely strong case. Particularily since he claims to have PRIOR ART which is key any IP case.


The MJ case is just retarded though.

While I am not disputing your position that there can be merit in a IP suit in general, I've also seen enough of these and how they turn out to feel my belief this is a load of BS is fairly justified. I've seen that type of chain of evidence be validated to a reasonable degree and then ruled non-germaine. Honestly, the Buchwald-Murphy case is about the only one of these I can recall as being substantiated to the point where plaintiffs case actually won. However, I also suspect that when it comes down to it, none of his major claims will be substantiated,. The timing is beyond suspicious. If his suit was that good, why'd he wait till after POTC2 was released?

The difference in the Buchwald case was that Paramount actually optioned the script at one point. Paramount settled out of court.

I am more than willing to concede that in general, the circumstances you describe are certainly feasible and that in theory that such a suit has merit is well within reason if you are willing to concede that the timing of the filing of this particular case calls into question over whether such merit in fact exists. Perhaps not in a court of law, but certainly in our court of public opinion.

that was kinda my point. Although IIRC, they only settled after the initial judgement went against them - but that suit took so long to play out I may be misrembering.

Paramount also did not have a ride about an African Price in two extremely well known theme parks for a number of decades prior to the movie's release.

Well if you are refering to the name of the movie that doesn't matter. It is possibly conceivable that Disney was thinking about making PoTC had a script come by the agents labeled Supernatural Pirates that was probably fairly shoddy and decided to take elements of the script they like to build a film on wihtout giving credit to the first script or paying him. If that were the case then Disney clearly erred.

It is also possible this is a broke guy who thinks it could be easy money which also happens.

Not that I really want to continue arguing since I think we agree on the basics. (Yeah, this is Possible. Also Possible Dude is FOS - Yes?)

But, there are very convincing points the writers make in the DVD commentary regarding the latent supernatural element that had always been in the ride. There are also some rather direct comments made by one of the writers regarding how some of the characters were named (the bit about how he was on ana animal kick). Characters which include Jack, Elizabeth and Will. So either that writer is lying, or we already have reason to question dude's version of events.