Randy Cassingham's Blog

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.

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.