2 ms·
> if I buy a soda with Coke's trademark design on it, I can be reasonably sure I'm buying an actual Coke product. This always felt like something better enforc
by gpm 5y ago
> if I buy a soda with Coke's trademark design on it, I can be reasonably sure I'm buying an actual Coke product.
This always felt like something better enforced via fraud laws than intellectual property to me. Property is the wrong metaphor for trademarks.
Right now you can do bullshit like sell and license trademarks, so I can't actually be confident that a FooBarWidget is made by FooBar. I can have some confidence that FooBar licensed there trademark for it, but they might be doing that as a way of cashing out on their reputation. That shouldn't be legal, that should be fraud.
A better replacement would be special fraud laws against some set of phrases like "Made By <Company>" and "Certified By <Company>", and using those phrase when it's not the case should be very illegal. Maybe there should be a replacement version of trademarks where you can register a distinctive image or made up word as being synonyms with "Made By <Company>", but that shouldn't be sellable, licensable, or anything else, it should be a simple synonym. While <Company> should be able to sue for damages if they can show them, the real enforcement should come from law enforcement because the entities actually being lied to and defrauded are the customers, not <Company>.
- munk-a 5y agoI think you're essentially describing Trademark by another name. In the case of Coke there is a distinct styling and branding they use (red cursive lettering being a big component) as part of the brand they use to represent their company name. There are bound to be a whole bunch of edge cases here and so creating a registry process for trademarks to remove any danger from being an accidental look-alike actually ends up protecting small businesses. Those rights being saleable and licensable honestly just strikes me as common sense because CocaCola might want to empower regional bottling plants to produce their product without putting those bottling plant subsidiaries in the awkward position where they refuse to operate because at any moment CocaCola could step in and essentially seize their entire business since, contractually, there is no method to allow CocaCola to lease out the rights to make such styled bottles removing the protection from bottling plants. Lastly, CocaCola as a brand definitely has a large value to the company - so if that brand is not saleable how are you going to quantify that value and allow a transferrence of the value of it between different shareholders, holding companies, or company owners/executives. I also think you're oversimplifying damages - CocaCola could suffer a reputation loss due to CocoCola including arsenic in their product and causing public confusion. I think these portions of the law are pretty complicated - yes - but they're that way because it's a complicated subject.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]