It’s been up since August this year, but I just now ran across it. Cory Doctorow has an excellent article on trademark law, and its abuses by overly-litigious corporate entities. Corporations, spurred on by their legal counsel, have become paranoid about maintaining 100% control over their trademarks, when such control is impossible in the face of legal, public usage of trademarks in day-to-day speech.
The irony is that the biggest mark of success in marketing a brand — its adoption as a household word — threatens to undermine the brand name as a trademark. Current trademark law sets companies up for failure. The more your brand becomes associated with a product or service, the more people generically use the brand in conversation, and the risk of losing control of your trademark increases. Placing the legal onus of defending a trademark on the company that owns it causes many corporations to waste millions of dollars on litigation of perceived trademark misuses.
Trademarks exist to protect consumers from ethically corrupt companies who might wish to market their inferior product under a competitor’s brand name. Cory argues that non-commercial uses of trademarks are never infringing, and even commercial uses that don’t cause confusion are perfectly acceptable. Many law firms treat trademark law as a license to print money, insisting to their clients that the only way to protect a trademark is to go after every single person who utters the trademark without due reverence and capitalization.
As a victim of this stupidity (see the notes on my former Lava Lamp software toy), I’m fed up with trademark law in the United States. The law as it stands hurts consumers rather than protecting them by forcing corporations to become language police. I’m a strong believer that, to truly benefit an economy, money spent should produce something useful, and spurious legal bills are anything but. Trademark law must be reformed to prevent the waste of millions of dollars that could go toward improving the economy.
