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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: 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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