It's a sad day at 36 Cooper Square, home of The Village Voice where the decades-old publication is finally giving up its legal battle with Time Out New York  over exclusive use of the phrase "Best of NYC."

On Tuesday afternoon, the weekly paper told Jeff Roberts at PaidContent that it would be abandoning a lawsuit against Time Out over the magazine's annual best of issue. "If you want to remain a for-profit business and someone steals from you, it is generally unwise to do nothing," the paper's editor Tony Ortega told Gothamist last year, when the paperwork for the lawsuit was filed. "The Voice has owned a registered trademark on 'Best of NYC' for more than a decade." Time Out countersued earlier this month claiming that the name was "merely descriptive, if not generic." New York Magazine's version is slightly different, calling itself "Best of New York," but they're all basically the same lists of good and services. Who can say which one is best?

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Adam Clark Estes