Trademarked Out of a Title
Around the first of the month I asked my lawyer to trademark "This Just In" -- the title of the column and newsletter that is coming up on a year old. The request results in the first "uh oh" of the publication's short life. Subscribe for Free The first step in that process is to ensure no one else has that as a trademark. He did a search ...and discovered that a major corporation had just applied for a trademark for the phrase! Worse, it was for "access through computer display to a portion of an electronic database which contains contents of a daily newspaper and summaries thereof." There was absolutely no way the two services could co-exist with the same name. Even though I had used it first (starting June 1994; they showed a "first use" of March 1995), I could fight the huge corporation and its large cadre of lawyers, or give up the title I had first. Even though I'm in the right, they did the legal work first, and it'd be a waste of money I didn't have to try to fight them. I wracked my brain for a good title -- one that was as good as This Just In. I tried to save the TJI acronym, but couldn't. "This Is True" was a favored catch-phrase of a friend when I was a teenager, and that popped to mind. It seemed to fit nicely -- I was publishing stories that were hard to believe, but true. I checked with my lawyer: it was clear. As soon as he filed the trademark application I switched the publication's name to This is True -- with the lower-case "i" ...and announced it with this week's issue. The only thing I didn't like about it: its acronym. I decided to call it True for short. Sure enough, a couple of weeks after I re-launched with the new name I got a NastyGram from the big corporation's lawyers, telling me to "cease and desist" using their trademark, and I had damn well better reply within 10 days crying "uncle". I waited a couple of weeks and sent them a letter: "That old title? I dumped it long ago." Pbbbt! Ironically, the Big Corporation gave up on the "This Just In" trademark -- as far as I can tell, they never did launch their computerized summary of newspaper stories -- and someone else has since grabbed it. Blog Updates
|