Posts Tagged: "Trademark Trolling"

Attorneys and non-attorneys love to make fun of these overly aggressive and unreasonable cease and desist letters. Online, a well-written and funny response can go viral, bringing much unwanted attention to the trademark holder and undermining the purpose of endeavor… The parody website ThinkGeek launched a fake product on April Fool’s Day in 2010 called Canned Unicorn Meat. The tag line read: Pate is passe. Unicorn, the new white meat. The National Pork Board, the trade group for pork farms, owns the trademark for “the other white meat” and completely missed the joke. They penned a 12-page cease and desist letter to ThinkGeek.

The USPTO defined the term Trademark Bullying as the vexatious practice of a trademark owner that uses its trademark rights to harass and intimidate another business beyond what the law might be reasonably interpreted to allow. Mirroring the modus operandi exhibited by patent assertion entities and copyright bullies, several creative mark owners have adopted and modified this sue-to-settle paradigm and applied it in the trademark context. In short, trademark trolls—businesses both large and small—aggressively assert rights beyond the scope of trademark protection afforded by the Lanham Act through the issuance of threatening cease-and-desist letters.