Using Trademarks in Business: Why a Girl Can’t Win a Trade Mark? How a Woman Can Attack a Supercorporation without a Registered Trademark
Even without a registered trademark, Bates could be opposed on the grounds that she used the trademark first. That deal with Verizon looks like it could be used in commerce. Bates isn’t making deals with megacorporations. Once again, this application is in the extremely early stages. It is likely to sit around for months before reaching an assessing attorney, which will allow people to file their own applications. Plenty of trademarks never even make it through this phase.
A trademark is a word, phrase, image, or combination of words that is used in commerce to identify what a lay person might call a “brand.” Examples of trademark are Law & Order “dun-DUN” or the NBC chimes. The law allows for a common law trademark with no paperwork but most companies file for a trademark registration if they have that entry in a government database. If you don’t own a passport or driver’s license, the paperwork will make it simpler to get one.
And crucially, during the application process, other people can file to oppose the registration. Disney tried to block registration of Deadmau5’s logo.
If you run a large company, there is still only a finite range of goods and services that you can register for. The more goods and services you claim the more pushback you will receive from the Trademark Office. Having a trademark doesn’t mean you “own” a word or phrase in the English language, and having that trademark in one industry doesn’t let you flex on all the others. Apple owns the trademark for all kinds of things, but it is impossible to stop people from selling fruit while calling it an apple. (In fact, the company was mired in years of legal finagling over its music-related services, thanks to the Beatles’ Apple Records.) Dove chocolate and Dove Deodorant are manufactured by two entirely different companies. Body wash, body bars soap and hair care preparations. Spirit Halloween (“For: IC 035 retail store services featuring Halloween merchandise”) and Spirit Airlines (“For: IC 039 Scheduled and chartered air transportation”) have no relation to each other.
The services that Bates wants to cover are “Advertising, marketing and promotional services related to all industries for the purpose of facilitating networking and socializing opportunities for business purposes,” a series of words that made me do a spit-take. The category of advertising, marketing, and promotional services is funny in its own right but the entire industry tips it over into genuinely hilarious comedy.
About a week ago, someone named Jefferson A. Bates filed the application to register “Very Demure.. Very Mindful..” as a trademark. A lot of people know that Jools Lebron is a TikTok founder, and that she was on Jimmy Kimmel last week, but they did not know she was the originator of the “very demure” meme. She made deals with the two internet providers on the back of “demure.” There is a link to a Facebook page with a post about the intellectual property rights for the Squid Game, and no one knows who Jefferson A. Bates is.
The first thing I want to say is that trademark is not the same as copyright, regardless of what’s written in The Sun article. A trademark is not the same as a trademark registration. The third — and most salient — thing is this: an application to register a trademark is neither.
The mailing address in the Trademark Office’s database seems to be for a brick-and-beige home that I will otherwise refrain from describing. The official website for TSDR has a link to the upcoming page for “very Demure,” with someone already having created a listing for it on a map. Very Mindful..” application. As of writing, four people have reviewed the listing, giving it an average rating of 1.0 out of 5.0 stars. Jefferson, you should be ashamed of yourself. one reviewer writes. One says it’s not very demure.
KAYLA Lewis: From Hip Hop to GoFundMe in a Game of a Kardashian-Like Threshold
In a deleted video, Lebron said her ability to sell demure- branded merchandise seemed to be in jeopardy. I feel like I drop the ball because I didn’t do as much as I could have for my family and I don’t know what I could have done better.
In the story of fellow Chicagoan Peaches Monroee, there is parallels with the situation that Lebron is in. In the summer of 2014, a then-teenager posted a video about her eyebrows on TikTok. Her catchphrase caught on everywhere, from Nicki Minaj lyrics to Kim Kardashian posts. Forever 21 made crop tops; brands like Taco Bell jumped on the trend. Monroee, who is known as “KAYLA Lewis,” didn’t get any rewards. Three years after the trend went viral, she launched a GoFundMe and raised just shy of $17,000, according to the campaign’s page.