The internet grows outraged over Oatly’s lawsuit against Glebe Farm, makers of PureOaty

When a big company sues a small company, the big company typically looks like a bully, or as one Twitter user put it, “a greedy capitalist pig”. Hence the recent backlash after we filed a lawsuit against the small Cambridgeshire-based food company, Glebe Farm, the makers of “PureOaty”.

This was a lawsuit about copyright infringement, and how the single letter Y creates too much of a similarity between OATY and OATLY. Unfortunately many people saw it as a “David versus Goliath'' showdown, or the age old “Small Swedish oat company makes it big, lets success go to their heads, forgets where they came from, and just starts suing anyone they can find.”

There were online petitions calling for a boycott of Oatly and a bunch of articles calling this a “massive PR disaster”. At one point, a journalist compared it to the BP oil spill, which we thought was a tad extreme, but we guess that’s what you call “poetic license”.

In the end, we lost the court case, which was deeply upsetting to our lawyer, because lawyers like to win their cases and then retire to their studies, but the loss was very well received by the thousands who signed those petitions.

 

What the internet said: