Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/12/ohio-state-university-loses-it.html
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You’d think these big schools would have good legal counsel to tell them “Yeah, that’s a stupid idea that will never fly.”
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They should’ve tried one for Dumbass
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Is that your experience with attorneys?
My experience is that they’re regularly redefining my notion of “egregious overreach”.
Whether they’re on my side of the table or not, I’ve found that asking an attorney to stake out a claim for an inch leads them to stake out a claim for a mile, even when it’s to the detriment of all parties involved.
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Who could have predicted that this would be denied?
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LeBron lost, too:
the USPTO refused James’s trademark application after finding that “Taco Tuesday” was a “commonplace message,” therefore failing to function as a trademark.
which is an interesting ruling given that Taco John’s already holds a trademark for Taco Tuesday.
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In related news, The Ohio State University Law School has just experienced a sudden drop in enrollment. /s
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Well, I have copyrighted the space character, so y’all need to cease and desist using in, and pay me a lot of cash.
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“The office says the university will have to prove the trademark would allow consumers to directly associate the goods with their brand.”
I suggest that that likely means that, as predicted, the ‘design’ they submitted and the trademark application was so broad that it wasn’t trademark-able.
Using “The…” on shirts/merch can easily fit in with OSU’s branding (they’ve been proud about the “The” prefix for years), if done right, and with a well designed, unique, trademark-able submission.
But also as predicted, this got them a ton of free press.
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For hopefully the last time, it wasn’t a “design” they were applying for. It was a Standard Character Claim which has no design attributes in the requested protection.
It’s why they lost.
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I am aware. That’s my exact point, yes. They didn’t apply for a design, they tried for a really broad, kinda pointless trademark that was destined to fail.
What I’m saying is that (as you yourself pointed out) they got a lot of free press out of this quickie application, and I’m guessing they’ll now spend some time on a nicely designed mockup and properly apply for a design trademark.
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In a different industry. Trademarks exist to prevent brand confusion. No one is going to reasonably confuse a production company with a chain of restaurants.
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Yeah, they’re getting a ton of free press about the ineptitude of their understanding of trademark law. Someone better call Saul rather than these clowns.
Bingo.
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Keep in mind that 99% of people won’t see this as “OSU doesn’t understand the complexities of trademark law”, they’ll see a headline on Twitter or Facebook that says “OSU Can’t Make ‘THE’ Shirts, Says Trademark Office” and move on with their day, having gotten OSU’s (nonexistent, for now) “THE” shirt advertised to them. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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That attorney was likely in a different building than the athletics and/or marketing department and responded with a “wait they did what?” when they found out.
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This is exactly the kind of thing that “no such thing as bad press” was coined for. Ohio State knew what they were doing. If they had somehow been granted the trademark they probably would have made a big show about being gracious and magnanimous in letting other schools use “The” in their names.It was a big-ass publicity stunt and it worked pretty well.
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