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From ArsTechnica
General Mills argued that it deserved to be awarded the trademark status because "consumers have come to identify the color yellow" on boxes of oats cereal with "the Cheerios brand." It has been marketed in yellow packaging since 1945, with billions in sales.
The board noted that "there is no doubt that a single color applied to a product or its packaging may function as a trademark and be entitled to registration under the Trademark Act." But that's only if those colors have become "inherently distinctive" in the eyes of consumers. Some of those examples include UPS "Brown;" T-Mobile "Magenta;" Target "Red;" John Deere "Green & Yellow;" and Home Depot "Orange." It goes without saying that anybody can still use those colors predominately in their marketing, but not direct competitors.
Regarding the box of Cheerios, however, the court ruled that consumers don't necessarily associate the yellow box of cereal with Cheerios, despite General Mills' assertion to the contrary. Consumers are confronted with a multitude of yellow boxes of oats cereal, the appeal board noted. By comparison, T-Mobile has only a handful of competitors, and none of them uses the magenta color as a distinctive mark, the appeal board said.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @12:59PM (7 children)
There are already laws against fraudulent/deceptive/misleading marketing and advertising. Trademarking a location is absurd. It's again the reason that you cannot call champagne champagne, but instead are legally required to call it sparkling wine. Imagine "Tex-mex" was trademarked and suddenly you could not call something Tex-mex unless it was made in Texas, or you couldn't call a Chicago hotdog a Chicago hotdog unless it was made in Chicago, or New York pizza crust couldn't be called as much unless it was... so forth and so on to no end.
Your defense of the system is optimistic. Trademarks in general have nothing to do with consumer protections. If they did, I would be the first to agree with you. In reality it always comes down to rent seeking and control.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 28 2017, @04:55PM (3 children)
Not if you're from the Champagne region of France and have been marketing your grapes for centuries.
Champagne got into the unfortunate position of becoming associated with a process, and actually a result of that process, that produces sparkling wine. They were the original and only their grapes reached the public as sparkling wine for long enough that the name association stuck. Now that any baboon can inject high pressure CO2 into a bottle and produce a sparkling wine, it isn't exactly right or fair to water down the Champagne brand (of grapes) by using the name inappropriately - but, lack of respect for the name-holders' rights has gone on long enough that it is perceived in the public consciousness as "absurd" that they should care.
It would be like calling all gravelly vocaled basic guitar and drum rock and roll with vague references to Jersey "Springsteen" - at once unfair to the artists not-Springsteen who make the music, and also unfair to Springsteen himself associating his name with product of questionable quality that he did not produce.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @06:20PM (2 children)
Intuition would make you think what you just said is right. After all Champagne has the trademark so surely, surely that means something.
Unfortunately, you are not right. Again, your view of trademarks is very "optimistic." No [wikipedia.org], Champagne did not invent champagne. It was invented and widely shared (the knowledge of that is) by an English scientist in the 1600s. And his invention in turn was a modification of an invention from some monks from Carcassonne in the 1530s. To be clear his recipe is what Champagne would rip off - exactly. Though that'd take a couple of centuries. Champagne, France produced 0 champagne until the 19th century.
And it gets even better. There happens to be a village in Champagne, Switzerland that has made a popular wine called Champagne dating back to 1657 - hundreds of years before the first bottle of champagne was ever made in Champagne. Thanks to trademark law they've been forced to change the name of their wine because trademarks are completely and absolutely illogical. And this is all incredibly typical for trademarks and trademark law.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday August 28 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
Yes. It means only wine produced in the Champagne region as defined by France's appellation d'origine contrôlée laws can be called champagne in France. The same way only wines produced in the Burgundy region in France can be called burgundy in France. Many wine producers around the world used to usurp French appellation names for products that ranged from somewhat similar to almost, but not quite, entirely unlike wine products. Most now have stopped this practice and instead use somewhat more accurate varietal names and/or local or proprietary names, but other than in France (and perhaps throughout the EU now) I do not believe this is trademarked or illegal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @05:17AM
This is a very intuitive and logical view but once again completely inaccurate. Intuition and logic have no place when it comes to trademarks and trade agreements. The story of how France managed to make it illegal for the vast majority of the world to use the world champagne to describe champagne starts as far back as the Treaty of Versailles - yip, the treaty that ended World War 1. As mentioned now the EU even forced Champagne, Switzerland to stop selling its wine as Champagne even though it had been doing it for hundreds of years before Champagne, France had sold a single bottle of champagne. This [winesandvines.com] provides some information on the background of how Champagne came to own a worldwide trademark on champagne. It's lacking some details, like the Treaty of Versailles section 275, but it's a good overview! That article also covers the reason why a handful of champagne producers (particularly in California) are allowed to call their champagne... champagne.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday August 28 2017, @05:11PM (2 children)
This gets to be a pretty interesting argument really. But I do see one difference: a "Florida orange" sounds like it should be an orange grown in Florida. However, a "Chicago pizza" (usually called "Chicago style pizza") surely isn't a pizza actually made in Chicago if it's a fresh (not frozen) pizza and you're not in Chicago: it's a particular style, just like Tex-Mex, New York pizzas, Philly cheese steaks, Mexican food, Chinese food, etc.
But unlike pizzas, tacos, cheese steaks, or lo mein, things like tomatoes and oranges aren't "made", they're grown. So why shouldn't a "Florida orange" be required to actually be grown in Florida? It does seem deceptive to label an orange that way if it was grown in Brazil. There's no such thing as a "Florida style orange"; oranges do have different species or cultivars, but these have their own specific labels not at all related to location (e.g., mandarin orange, naval orange, clementine, blood orange, tangelo, etc., and the industry probably has far more specific naming conventions than this).
So for "champagne", the problem I see there is that that's a particular style of making something; it's not something you just grow, pick off the tree, and sell as-is, and the art of champagne-making has been copied by many other places, just like the art of making "port". And for many things, location-based name protection really doesn't make much sense, because it's not a guarantee of value at all (but rather the reverse): would I rather eat a pizza crust made in New York, or would I rather eat a freshly-made pizza crust made in New York style? The latter of course, because I don't live in or very near to NYC, so the former would mean a crappy frozen crust. Or how about a genuine made-in-Philly cheese steak? Again, I don't live that close to Philly, so it's not going to be very good since it'll be frozen, and there's no way with those highly different ingredients that it'll reheat very well.
However, having any kind of protection does, as you say, reek of rent-seeking, so there really needs to be a good case for having such a law, versus having no law. Why can't orange sellers simply advertise "grown in Florida", and have that part protected (as it probably already is, by false-advertising laws)? "Florida orange" implies it comes from Florida, but a label saying "product of Florida USA" is very explicit. So in summary, I really don't see a good case for protecting these location names at all. If sellers want to make customers feel good about something based on its origin, they can proudly print that somewhere on the product or package, just like we already do for most manufactured goods.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @06:40PM (1 child)
Mandarin oranges may have an etymology in location as well, though it looks like it's tough to know for sure due to their age. Another thing even more damning on champagne is that Champagne, France did not [wikipedia.org] even invent it. It was invented and the recipe/process widely shared and published by an English scientist hundreds of years before Champagne made their first bottle. And thanks to their trademark they've forced a village in Champagne, Switzerland to change the name of their local wine which they've been selling as Champagne since the 1600s - hundreds years before Champagne made their first bottle of champagne. It's all just so incredibly silly.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 28 2017, @11:49PM
Nobody said that the French were Nice people (well, there is that town on the med coast, but they're almost as stuck up there as the Parisians.)
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