You mean it’s not THE Moritz College of Law?
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Reminds me of a common beginning writer’s mistake:
THN EED
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You may be right, but I think you and Cory throw around “stupid” a little too much here.
Here’s a quick comparison. Let’s say some marketing guy for Monty Python decides to make shirts that just say “IT’S…” on them, and they file for a trademark to make sure fan sites don’t steal the idea. On one level they’re trademarking the word “IT’S”, which seems dumb. But for them, it’s a reference fans will get, so it’s a pretty good idea to trademark it.
Similarly, “THE” is a reference that OSU students/fans will get, because the university makes a big deal of being THE Ohio State University. So it’s a very good idea to trademark it. What they really need to do, however, is trademark a specific design and wordmark, rather than be so broad about it.
Still an overreach, Doctorow’s usual penchant for hyperbole notwithstanding.
Agreed.
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In the context of what Cory’s claiming (which is untrue), sure. I see what they’re trying to do as a piece of long-standing OSU branding, but as @tuhu is getting at, what they need is an actual visual brand around this that can be trademarked. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s what they do if this is rejected.
Trying to be too ‘clever’ for their own good, IMO.
It will be.
A specific font, color combo or stylization of the letters “THE?” You betcha; that, they can totally do.
But it wouldn’t get as much free buzz if they went about it in a straight-forward way.
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Doesn’t THE university have a law-school that could prevent this kind of public embarrassment?
I’m sure they do and I’m sure they teach their students to never give legal advice to someone who isn’t paying you for it, including your university.
You’re conflating the purposes of copyright, patents, and trademarks here.
Trademarks don’t protect “ideas”, as a central objective. Their main purpose is to avoid confusion between market entities. Trademarks don’t, for instance, protect the idea of having an animal as a logo, but they’ll offer protection to ensure people know which animal goes with which company.
For a generic term to have any kind of trademark protection, it has to be distinguishably associated with a group, in the details, over all other possibly confusable groups.
Monty Python could only trademark “it’s” if it had other details that made it clear that it was clearly associated with Monty Python. It has nothing to do with the “idea”. They can copyright intellectual cultural output, even if it sounds similar to something someone else has done in the past or contains generic parts. Things like IBM, or CIA, or NASA, have a trademark-able aspect on just their initials, because 90% of the references in some fields are going to be the one organization and not the International Bodega Mavens. It has nothing to do with the “idea” of putting the letters “I”,“B”,and “M” together.
90% of the instances of the letters “THE” on clothing do not reference Ohio State University, so they’re not going to get protection on the letters alone, and they shouldn’t, because as you claim, they couldn’t want to stop other people from using the letters THE on clothing, which would mean the trademark would offer no way to differentiate who was confusing consumers, the main point of trademarks.
A good publicity stunt, but there’s no trademark argument there.
I never said a single thing about patents, nor copyright. I work with trademarks every day. I know the difference, and it’s clear you’re confused about what I’m saying. But thank you!
Except that OSU has used “The” as part of their branding for quite a long time. As we’ve all been saying, and I think we agree, what they really need to do to make this work is to submit a visual wordmark they can really own.
Which part is untrue? Because the application as it stands is literally an application to trademark “THE” as a combination of letters with no designation of font or color. If granted, it would make a T-shirt with “MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU” in violation of that trademark. Which would be stupid.
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You talked about protecting “the idea” which is a part of copyright and patents, but that isn’t what trademarks protect.
If you say so, who am I to disagree?
Which is the point, and we can agree. This application isn’t making the argument that it needs to, because it’s claiming a generic word as a distinguishing mark, which fails the most basic point of a trademark. Which is why people think it’s a stupid application as it is.
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Didn’t Monty Python once try to use the Lanham Act as a backdoor for the “Moral Rights of the Author”?
#whom
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Too Late! I’ve trademarked each letter of the alphabet and I’ve patented the written language and the dictionary.
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“Teh.” That made me remeber Sylvan Migdal’s wonderful webcomic “Where the Typos Og”, which unfortunately seems no longer to be online
I suspect this may make it an attractive item for exclusive monetisation.
Just thinking out loud here.
No, no, they’re just fans of French tea. That’s not a Nike swoosh above the ‘e’, it’s an accent.
Cory’s headline leaves out the context of the trademark application being specifically for clothing featuring a graphic of the word “THE” by itself. His headline and story make it sound like OSU is trying to literally trademark the word “the”, which leads people to believe things like what you posted. Which isn’t true.
As plenty of people (including you) have pointed out, that’s not exactly specific. It’s about as generic a trademark application as I can imagine.
I think for a non-technical audience, a headline that says files for a trademark on “THE” is sufficiently nice and accurate, especially given that the article states that’s in relation to clothing and links to the application in question. It’s a headline. It’s supposed to give you an idea of what the article is about and make you want to read it.
I appreciate a debate about the nuances of intellectual property law as much as the next legally-inclined nerd but is this really an argument worth having?
I can’t see anything in Cory’s article which is actually wrong apart perhaps from the bit about it not surviving examination.
Given that, as I understand it, the current stance is “allow anything that isn’t challenged, people can always apply to have it removed later”, it may well be granted if not challenged.
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Just in case the links were funky, I searched for it in the USPTO database. This application is NOT for a word mark or graphic in any way. It is for the word “THE” on apparel items. There is no graphic. There is no font, size, or color specified. Any use of the the word “THE” on any apparel item would be covered by this trademark. My example stands: a t-shirt saying “May the force be with you” would violate this trademark, if it were granted, which it won’t.
Note that the USPTO requires that you select a category when you apply for a trademark. So saying that it’s only for apparel doesn’t make this a “smart” trademark. It’s still dumb. Note also that it doesn’t even limit it to uppercase letters. All trademarks are represented in upper-case letters in the USPTO database, and apply to all combinations of upper and lower case for the given word, unless it’s associated with a wordmark or graphic logo.
So, yeah, stupid trademark application.
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