PornHub owner MindGeek is threatening a kebab shop in NYC with trademark infringement::If you’ve been listening to the Vergecast you know the standard for trademark infringement is “likelihood of confusion,” and while it’s true the Hub is known for ⚫️🟠, something tells me the folks walking into Doner Haus aren’t confused about what’s on the menu. Full story in Chelsea News, a hyperlocal NYC news site, via Verge pal Alexandra Roberts.
Trademark’s a weird one, if you don’t defend it you lose it. So it’s kind of a lose-lose situation from the trademarkers position. They have to pursue or they lose their trademark which they value
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Idk the combination of the white text followed by black text within an orange rounded rectangle logo when paired with tag lines like ‘get stuffed’ might lead people to think it’s a subsidiary or something similar.
A place known for it’s sausages and a restaurant may seem like a strange business partnership but stranger things have happened.
Yeah but if you don’t sue, a legitimate infringer in the future might use not enforcing on the trademark there to argue there own case. Trademark law really doesn’t leave trademark holders in a good position. Though I imagine that a lawsuit when those laws were written weren’t nearly as prohibitively expensive.
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Pretty sure it would have to be determined in a court of law that an infringement occurred in the first place.
I mean, if they don’t care about the actual usage, they could licence it for a buck or something
As a non-American, US intellectual property law feels absolutely ridiculous to me sometimes. It feels like it incentivizes all the wrong behaviours.
It’s hard to balance but it prevents trademark squatters from existing like in the domain name space
As a US Citizen I agree. We also let corporations lobby to make the rules have no relation to what they were set up for.
Copyright for instance was supposed to allow people to use novel work in the open without getting copied for a short period of time before it became public domain. Now Copyright is nearly perpetual, it keeps getting extended when a certain mouse is close to losing their copyright.