Originally published at: WalMart moves to stop Yeezy registering trademark on dotted sun logo | Boing Boing
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I mean, Agilent are the ones who should really be protesting! 
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Those logos are not similar
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Next thing you know, WalMart is going to sue cats for having assholes that look too much like their logo.
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I thought it was a rare 8-player variant of the board game Aggravation, and likely played with an 8-sided die.
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I thought the very same thing. Agilent split off from HP in 1999 (I was there) and adopted the dotted star logo. That said, I’ve never mistakenly walked into a Walmart looking for a mass spectrometer.
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And their prices on a 93000 SOC tester are terrible!
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I thought I heard a barking spider somewhere…
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If they lose, Walmart will
Meanwhile, I’m going to trademark the interrobangorix.
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points for Vonnegut.
bonus points for Breakfast of Champions
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IANAL, but the way trademark law works seems to require this sort of hostile behavior. You can lose your trademark if you’ve ever been shown to be “not defending it”. What constitutes “not defending” your trademark is of course pretty vague, but it causes corporations to err on the side of hyper aggression. I suppose the intent of the law is to prevent camping on symbols for eternity, gradually rendering all of language and graphic art unusable. Still, this gets a little silly in cases like this.
The other important detail often lost in conversations like this is that it only matters if you’re in the same industry. That’s why Wal-Mart would sue Kanye and not Agilent over this. That’s what “customer confusion” means. It’s not bullshit corporate-speak, that’s the legal term for when two companies have similar marks in the same industry (fashion, presumably, in this case). Delta faucets and Delta airlines have the same name and very similar marks, but that’s fine because no customer confusion is created.
I’m not saying Wal-Mart aren’t being dicks, but you can see why companies like them do things like this.
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They suing the Butthole Surfers next?
It’s times like this where @doctorow leaving BoingBoing does hurt, as his insights into copyright and trademark law helped shape my own views.
On the other hand, this is weak compared to the decades long fight that went on between Apple Music and Apple Computers, only really ending when the latter bought the former.
I for my part smell a case of Walmart’s legal department finding a case to bill Walmart for expensive “work” writing nastygrams, possibly with an eye to coercing a settlement where Yeezy into a promotion/partnership thingy.
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If you enjoy his musings, sign up for his newsletter https://pluralistic.net/ I actually prefer reading his stuff in a mail client than on his site (probably cuz I’m lazy and it’s a push mechanism).
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Added to my Feedly, but still it would be cool to see emeritus Boingers show up to give their two eurocents now and then.
That is quite a story. The bully became the bullied there. They initially had a long standing agreement to share the name as long as Apple Computer didn’t enter the music business. Interestingly though, Apple Music fired the first shot when the Apple IIgs computer came out. The sound chip in it was a high quality synthesizer-grade device, and Apple Music felt that constituted “entering the music business”. At the time Apple Computer was small and Apple Music thought they could bully them. Apple Computer successfully argued the case on its merits though. They won that and the agreement stood quietly (no “customer confusion”) for decades until…iTunes. That’s when Apple Computer intentionally went nuclear and knew they could win because they had infinite money at that point. The David/Goliath roles had flipped.
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