A U.K. company has just trademarked the word should’ve. And just for safety, in case its competitors can’t spell, it threw in shouldve, without the apostrophe.
It’s ridiculous, but lots of odd stuff gets trademarked. A while ago, Val at Quiet Season mentioned that the Royal Mail has trademarked the shade of red it uses on its trucks and on mailboxes. Okay, it calls them post boxes, and since it owns them I suppose it gets to decide what they’re called. Maybe it should trademark post box and see if that doesn’t catch the attention of stubborn Americans who continue to mail their letters instead of posting them.
Sadly, trademarking the color doesn’t mean it can then sue anyone who uses that shade of red to knit a hat or a pair of socks. Ditto with a word. The Should’ve Corporation can’t sue us for saying “should’ve.” (No, Should’ve Corporation isn’t its name but I’m not in the mood to give it the tiny bit of extra publicity I have at my disposal.)
Why do I say “sadly” when I’m talking about them not being able to sue people? Because I do so love it when businesses and governments and all those other fine folks with power at their disposal overreach. Britain’s courts are already in a quiet and unpublicized meltdown because the government slashed access to legal aid. That’s meant that people who can’t afford lawyers but who are now ineligible for legal aid are having to represent themselves, and predictably enough a lot of them are making a time-wasting mess of it, and cases are backing up. I know that’s not funny, it’s tragic, but it also is bitterly funny. All we need to do is pour everyone saying “should’ve” or wearing the wrong shade of red into the courts on top of that to make a real mess.
But no, that’s not what trademarking is about. It means that if you go into competition with the trademark owner, you can’t use the trademarked whatever. If you compete with the Royal Mail, you can’t use their color. If you’re in the apple pie business, though, you can use any color you like, although you might want to be careful of the word apple because some corporation or other (its name has slipped my mind) owns that and may give you grief about it. Because even if you’re not really in competition, you won’t find clear lines here and it all gets silly very quickly. Sky TV trademarked the word sky and then sued Skype—even though they’re not in the same business—because it’s logo looks like a cloud. Or so the article I linked to above says. To me, it looks like a blue blob. But as a court explained, “clouds are to be found ‘in the sky.’ “
I can’t argue with that. I can’t understand its relevance, but it’s true beyond the reach of logic, and maybe what I just looked at is the new sky-free logo.
Sky also sued the makers of the video game No Man’s Sky, although they too seem to be in another kind of business. Even as I type, some court may be weighing the question of whether the sky is to be found in the sky.
To date, the entire language is still available for noncommercial use, but keep your eye on this space. I’ll let you know if that changes.
That’s kind of crazy, isn’t it ? * greedy corporations, hymmmph *
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Hymmmph indeed, and I’ll even go along with the asterisks.
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Good God (TM).
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Just for clarity: Is it the entire phrase you’re trademarking or the two pieces separately?
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All three… one can’t be too cautious about these things.
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You’ve done this before. I can tell.
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Nothing gets nonsensical faster than when translated into legalese – which was designed to ‘clarify’ things.
And I hope you took the slugs to court for destroying your lovely petunias.
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I hadn’t thought of that. I will. Thanks for thinking of it.
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I worked for a little while with a company that did some trademark work in the US. The trademarks granted were very specific to what area you were going to use them in. So if you were trademarking, say, the name of a restaurant, you would be granted the protection only for the restaurant class, but not for any other stuff. If you wanted protection for the restaurant name on a T-shirt, you had to make sure to also apply for that class too. And you couldn’t trademark just a descriptive name, either, but made-up words were easy to get protection on. I think that’s why so many businesses have gone over to strange-sounding names, or misspellings in their names (which explains “Froot Loops,” “Kool-aid” and “Chick-Fil-A”). And even if you couldn’t get a particular word, you might be able to get protection for its use in a particular color and type font. And a phrase is easier to register than just a single word.
The strangest example I know of is when a company trademarks a color. Owens Corning trademarked a particular shade of pink, for fiberglass insulation. I think UPS has trademarked “brown”.
I don’t know anything about the British versions of these rules, though.
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Interesting. A small women’s bookstore in Minneapolis–Amazon Books–sued Amazon the giant and won, sort of. Amazon didn’t change its name, but it did pay the bookstore to change its. But trademarking the color brown? That strikes me as pretty nutty.
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It wouldn’t surprise me if right now someone in the UK’s current Conservative government is working out some way to privatise British English and make some money out of it.
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And then charge people to use it? I’m sure right now someone’s complaining that the language just isn’t paying its way.
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People will try to patent/trademark/design register almost anything it they think they can get away with it. In 1960, the French artist Yves Klein developed an intense blue colour which he called International Klein Blue (IKB) and he registered the formula for it in France. So maybe there’s some precedent for the Royal Mail registering the red of its post boxes, now it’s a privatised company. I wonder if the Royal Mail will also try to register the gold colour they painted some post boxes in during the 2012 Olympics – boxes in the home towns’ of those Team GB athletes who won gold medals.
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I can see the argument for IKB if he came up with the way to create the color, but wouldn’t that be a patent issue, not a a trademark one? I seriously doubt the Royal Mail created its particular red any more than it invented gold.
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According to Wikipedia, Klein’s registration was under some or other French law, so it only applied in France, It was a sort of pre-patent application, but he never actually patented his formula. He developed it “in collaboration with Edouard Adam, a Parisian art paint supplier…” It’s a lovely intense blue, by the way.
More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Klein_Blue
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I love how much I end up learning here.
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Well, I can see the logic in it as long as it remains in the corporate realm.
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In the abstract, perhaps, but then there are the stories of huge corporations taking small ones to court over absurd overlaps–the use of the word sky, is an example. And small businesses often have to back down because they can’t afford to fight the case, even if it’s absurd.
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All is not lost–yet. Tracing back through the articles: “accepting” the application doesn’t mean approving the application–it means that they didn’t throw it out. You can apply to protect lots of things as a trademark–that doesn’t mean that the requested status as mark will be accepted. (Yes, I meant to say “mark,” not “trademark.”)
Excellent book on the subject: “Linguistic battles in trademark disputes,” by Roger Shuy. https://smile.amazon.com/Linguistic-Battles-Trademark-Disputes-Shuy/dp/0333997581/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1472248085&sr=1-1&keywords=roger+shuy+trademark
…and, yes, I am geeky enough to have enjoyed a book titled “Linguistic battles in trademark disputes.” :-)
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It takes a careful eye to spot that. Thanks for having one, and for turning it this way. All power to the geeks and their bookshelves.
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Reminds me of a court case some years ago. A hairdresser near Heathrow Airport called their business “British Hairways”. Guess who took legal action against them?
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What a great name. I expect they’ve had to change it.
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It’s truly sad. During the Olympics, if you weren’t one of the mega-money sponsors, you couldn’t say “Olympics” “Olympians” “Olympic athletes or games” You couldn’t mention, tweet, post on Facebook those words or contestant names – and you couldn’t say “summer” – I had this written as part of an upcoming post. You can consider this a preview. Even though we’re in the same line of work, you can say any of those words. And the Royal Post folks have nothing to worry about. We have mail and mailboxes are blue.
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Yes, well, if you’re dealing with mail and they’re dealing with post, it should all be fine. I will now type the words summer, Olympics, Olympians (the Olympian gods are furious that they didn’t get there with a trademark first), games, athletes, and poppycock. Daring, aren’t I?
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Yo go girl. I’d love to see Zeus send the IOC a cease & desist order.
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In the form of a thunderbolt, right?
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Nice touch. I didn’t think of that.
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The law is an ass (Charles Dickens)
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That’s one of many quotes I know but don’t know the source of. Thanks for giving me a source.
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You’re welcome!
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Now the trick will be to remember. That’s where I generally run into problems.
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To my mind, the worst example of corporate monolopising of common resources in order to make money, have been the attempts since the 1990s to patent parts of the human genome. A gross distortion of what patents are meant for if ever there was one. The sad thing about it is that it was a scientist, Craig Venter, who first seriously attempted to do this. Other members of the human genome research community, particularly those in the UK, raced Venter’s commercial research outfit to discover and publish huge amounts of the human gene sequence, so they would be in the public domain before Venter and his crew could gain a monopoly by attempting to claim Intellectual Property Rights on them. By all accounts it was touch and go though.
According to the US web site https://www.genome.gov/19016590/intellectual-property/: “In a landmark decision in June 2013, the Supreme Court determined that DNA in its natural form cannot be patented.” In the UK and Europe the situation seems to be somewhat murkier. The UK Institute of Cancer research published a position statement on this in which they said “isolated DNA should not be classed as an invention and therefore should not be eligible for patenting.” But throughout the world,including the UK, lots of biomedical corporations are busy attempting to patent bits of the human genome through various technical loopholes in the patenting laws of different countries. I think it’s a scandal that could have serious repercussions for medical research worldwide.
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Boy, could it ever!
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People are ridiculous. I like your slugs better.
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I understand how you feel, but the better I know slugs, the more I like people. If those are the two alternatives.
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There must be a third. Can’t we have a third?
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Cats?
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I found out recently someone in the USA trademarked my blog name as a new cat food brand! Look me up and get a bunch of cat food flavors or flavours! At least they are grain and gluten free! An annoying sideline, I recently decided to buy a new domain name and wanted the “dot com” version only to find out someone in Quebec bought it a week before! I cannot seem to be quick enough off the mark. Naturally when I go to their domain, they are not using it! Notes from the UK may get trademarked for selling those yellow square sticky notes people stick all over their desks and paperwork. You better get a move on before it is too late!
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There are people out there, I’ve read, who buy domain names they have no intention of using so they can sell them to the people who might actually want them. Writers organizations warn their members to buy their domain names before their books come out and before anyone else can.
Maybe I should start producing sticky notes.
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Six years of blogging and when I finally decide to buy my domain, I miss by a week! I am still smoking! You might want to trademark your name and just sit on it! Who knows?
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I actually have a web site that I set up when my second novel came out. My first reaction when the domain name was available was, Great, no one’s heard of me. My second was, Damn, no one’s heard of me. I don’t think I’ll trademark the name, though. Someone might want to foist it on some unsuspecting child.
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I looked!
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And lived to tell the tale.
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I have now subscribed to that site as well!
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Sadly, I don’t add much to it anymore. But you never know.
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Wow, Ellen. Should’ve should be common property like songs in the “public domain.” Ridiculous, yet oddly entertaining.
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There’s nothing as entertaining as high-end absurdity.
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Hey, it’s my friend Ellen.
Great to see you at Blogger’s Pit Stop last week.
I am reading more about branding. Is that like trademarking?
Thanks for bringing your post to Blogger’s Pit Stop last week.
Janice, Pit Stop Crew
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And thanks for everything you do to keep the pit stop running.
As far as I understand the way people are using the word branding, the two are linked but not the same. Trademarking is the legal end of it–the part that keeps everyone else away from something a corporation wants people to associate with its brand. Should’ve is a ridiculous example–a word in too common usage to work (in my highly skewed opinion).
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I had no idea one could trademark such things! Lol
Great read!
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I thought the courts being tied up with silly stuff only happened here in the USA! I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, since everything we know here about the judicial system was most likely brought over from the UK with the colonists and hacked to death once it got here. :) I can make those remarks with lousy authority since I live in the place the first colonists got lost. Greetings from the Outer Banks of NC!
Great post! I enjoyed it!
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Given that humans are a difficult–and although I do like people, I begin to think, extremely silly–species, I’d be surprised to learn that this sort of thing is limited to countries that derived their legal systems from the U.K. But our shared history may determine the sort of silliness we’re prone to. It’s like schizophrenia: It occurs in the same proportions across all cultures, but the content of people’s voices differs from culture to culture.
Boy, was that ever a strange bit of free association.
Thanks for the greeting. Good of you to drop in.
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Interesting. Another example is Apple Records. They were ‘Apple’ before Steve Jobs’ Apple. (I think) As far as I know, nobody sued anybody. Good piece!
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Good point, and you’re right: As far as I can reconstruct the sequence, when Apple Records was founded, computers took up an entire room and other than records, apples were pretty much just a fruit.
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Hahahahaha!!!
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This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life!
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I don’t know. It’s got an awful lot of competition these days.
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Ok, most ridiculous in my communications career.
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Fair enough.
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I think my childhood ended in 1994 (I was 24, so what!) when I read that Microsoft put a trademark on the entire sentence: “Where do you want to go today?” Somehow it made me realise that I need to be very careful with this world.
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Right. That thought now belongs to them and can no longer be thought for free. You’re right–we need to be very careful.
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Sorry, no. Whatever you have to say, say it here.
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