Vogue magazine threatens to sue a 200-year-old PUB.
- Thread starter Scania
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 13 May 2003
- Posts
- 8,956
I think if you have a trademark you are required to defend it lest you lose it. Anyone know if that's correct?
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Oct 2005
- Posts
- 6,243
- Location
- North of Watford Gap
Well, there is protecting your trademark, and then there is this nonsense.
They should have done the tiniest bit of reasearch and realised that the town is called Vogue, and existed before the magazine was ever imagined.
Yes, it is. But only against things that might reasonably be a threat to the copyright and that doesn't include the idea that people travelled through time to create a village centuries before your copyright existed and named that village after your copyright. Nor does it include the idea that a village might be mistaken for a magazine.
The issues are cost cutting and relative power. It's much cheaper to jump immediately to threats and a large business usually has far more power than the people they're threatening. So that's what often happens. I wasn't entirely joking when I said that the legal business that sent the letter on behalf of the magazine publisher was using bots. Bots are cheaper than paying people and much cheaper than paying people to do the job properly. There's only a very small chance of a incorrectly targetted person being able to do anything about it by getting enough publicity to be a potential PR issue for the company and that can be addressed with an apology. Still much cheaper than paying people to do the job properly. Still cheaper than assigning the lowest paid intern to spend a few minutes doing basic checking when they could be assigned to be doing something that will make more profit for the legal firm.