EU Doesn't Buy Spam Trademark From Hormel

from the give-it-up dept

Thu, Oct 5th 2006 4:07pm — Mike Masnick

Hormel, maker of the infamous spam meat-like product, has had a love/hate affair with the unsolicited email version of spam. While they were upset about its use at first, they later said it was okay (and sometimes bordered on embracing it). Yet, there were times when they'd still sue over the use of "spam" in a trademark case, though, they never seem to win. The latest move, is that they tried to register "spam" across the European Union as a trademark when used in talking about unsolicited email. This is a bit odd, considering that the company is in the meat-like substances business, not the email business. So, it should come as no surprise that the EU has denied the trademark application, probably finding Hormel's claim laughable that people more readily associate the word spam with their "kind of spicy ham" food product than junk email. Perhaps it's time for Hormel to just accept its fate in the world as inspiring the word for unsolicited email (with a diversion through Monty Python first).

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7 Comments

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Stu, 5 Oct 2006 @ 4:56pm

Talk about a double edged sword.

I wonder if the old axim - "print anything you want about me, as long as you spell my name right" applies here. (hee hee hee)
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- Jerk, 5 Oct 2006 @ 5:09pm
  
  Re:
  Probably, Sto, probably.
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Myself, 5 Oct 2006 @ 5:42pm

Unintended consequences...
And the thing is, I never got the sense that the Python crew disliked spam, it was just ubiquitous in certain circles and they felt like poking fun at it. I've never seen a statement from them about how they feel about the resulting trademark dillution.
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Rick, 5 Oct 2006 @ 6:18pm

I thought trademark law only applied to LIKE products?

Google may own the trademark 'google' as it applies to web based search engines - but they don't own the number 'google which is 1 followed by 100 zeros.
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- slojohn, 5 Oct 2006 @ 6:58pm
  
  Re:
  They can't, because the number is googol
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foofdawg, 5 Oct 2006 @ 8:36pm

I agree, but that just goes to show you how the advertising industry is killing spelling in today's youth.

Sortof. (heh)

They have to deal with a lot more ubiquitous word usage than I did as a youth, but they still don't seem to get it, even with more examples around every day.

Oh well.....
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Tim, 9 Oct 2006 @ 7:18am

It always used to be that `SPAM' was the hormel version while `spam' was the junk-email one. But why not just say UBE or UCE as the case might be? ;p
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