Beyond The Taco: Someone Is Now Trying To Trademark 'Breakfast Burrito'

from the a-burrito-trademark dept

This very morning, I paid $5 for a breakfast burrito at a place near where I work. To be frank, I regret to say that it was ultimately disappointing. How in the world do you construct a steak breakfast burrito that lacks salt? The great news for me is that there are roughly a gazillion places around me that also advertise breakfast burritos, so I currently have other places to get them. The bad news, however, is that someone out there is taking a run at trademarking "breakfast burrito", so that might not be the case in the future.

Recently, the Twitter account for Timberlake Law—a North Carolina based specialist in trademarks and copyrights—posted a link to the United States Patent and Trademark Office's website for an application to trademark the term "Breakfast Burrito."

Though most people will inherently sense that this seems ridiculous, Timberlake does a good job of spelling out the reason: "While it's true that the drawing and specimen should match, the mark and the goods shouldn't," the tweet explains. To put it another way, the application seeks to trademark the phrase "Breakfast Burrito," but in the section where the applicant explains what the trademark is for, the answer is "Breakfast burritos; Burritos." Basically, if the only way you can describe what you're trying to trademark is by using the same phrase as the trademark, then there's a solid chance that the phrase is common enough that it can't be trademarked in the first place. It doesn't take much legalese to understand that.

Put more simply: a trademark can't be for the generic name of a product or service. This should be obvious to all, as the point of trademark law is absolutely not to narrowly limit the choices consumers have for a given product or service. Still, this concept seems to elude some people.

The whole thing should remind you of the whole "Taco Tuesday" fiasco that is continuing to date, where Taco John's somehow got a trademark for a phrase that describes serving people tacos on Tuesdays. In fact, that analogous trademark issue is useful as a marker for how the Trademark Office is complicit in fostering an environment in which people think they can trademark something like "breakfast burrito."

As to who is actually trying to do so in this case, it's something of a mystery.

So who exactly wants the rights to eggs wrapped in a tortilla in the morning? Eater attempted to get to the bottom of this application and, unsurprisingly, didn't get very far. The site "reached out to the person listed on the application," whose address "matches that of a personal injury law firm in LA," but "did not hear back on requests for comment made over email and the phone by press time."

So what's this all amount to? Likely very little. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can attempt to trademark anything. Receiving a trademark and then protecting it is far more difficult, and based on the assessment of Timberlake and findings of Eater, this attempt to register "Breakfast Burrito" appears to be a random shot in the dark.

A shot that should, and likely will, fail. Still, we have a Taco Tuesday trademark, so how much of a stretch is it to see the USPTO rubberstamping one for "breakfast burrito" as well?

Filed Under: breakfast burrito, burrito, taco, trademark

DailyDirt: Will Refill Cartridges For Food Printers Be Insanely Expensive?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The technology for 3D printing is getting better and cheaper all the time, but some folks think the "killer app" for these printing machines is in food preparation. Food printers aren't quite like Star Trek replicators just yet -- nor is there a way to eliminate the scarcity of food. Still, it'll be pretty cool when most households own an oven, stove, microwave oven... and a 3D food printer.

• Peter Thiel's philanthropic foundation has invested in Modern Meadow -- a company that will develop 3D bioprinting techniques for disrupting the current meat industry. Growing edible meat tissue without a farm could be more environmentally friendly, but one of the company's first goals is to just grow a 1-inch long piece of synthetic meat suitable for eating. [url]
• Cornell University has a food printing lab as part of its Fab@Home venture. This group has been working on printing food since 2007, and the researchers speculate that food printers could vastly reduce the time people spend preparing food. [url]
• Burritob0t is an open source project to create a Tex-Mex 3D printer, capable of generating tasty, custom burritos from extruding ingredients such as beans, rice, cheese and salsa onto a tortilla. Unfortunately, lettuce and chunky salsa aren't on this robot's menu -- but perhaps a meat paste could be added... [url]
• Chocolate lovers in the UK might want to thank researchers at the University of Exeter for creating a 3D printer that prints layers of chocolate. These developers want to create a website that anyone can print chocolate creations from -- but they'll probably need a really good Spam filter before they turn that feature on. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: 3d printers, burrito, burritob0t, chocolate, fab@home, food, peter thiel, replicator
Companies: modern meadow