Guy Sued Over Trademark On 'Fruit Of The Month Club' Turns Around And Sues Others Over 'Cheese Of The Month Club'

from the wrong-lesson-learned dept

Sometimes people who are sued over highly questionable copyright, patent or trademark laws turn into activists against the abuse of those laws (or against those laws altogether). At other times... the opposite occurs, and they realize that if others can abuse the law to their own benefit, they might as well too. Eric Goldman has the story of a guy, Anshu Pathak, who was sued a few years ago for offering a Fruit of the Month Club, which the company Harry & David claimed infringed on their own trademark. While Pathak fought this, now he's turned around and done pretty much the same thing, suing a bunch of companies, including Harry & David, over his own trademark on "Cheese of the Month Club." Apparently he more or less copied one of the earlier lawsuits. He includes Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in the lawsuit because of keyword ad sales on the term -- an argument that's unlikely to get very far.

Of course, Goldman does a nice job of expressing (with only slightly uncharacteristic exasperation) how silly this whole thing is:

What a load of nonsense. The world would be a better place if we just declared the phrase "[food] of the month club" generic so that no one could claim a trademark in it. Even if the phrase once was descriptive and thus capable of secondary meaning, it has become genericized through overuse. In contrast, so long as we recognize trademark rights in watered-down descriptive terms like "[Food] of the month clubs," we get bogus disputes between companies with crummy trademarks, all of them tearing each other down rather than actually doing a better job for their customers. What a shame.

Filed Under: anshu pathak, cheese of the month club, fruit of the month club, of the month, trademark