“Please note, the hashtag is for our paying advertisers”
twitter.com
twitter.com
So all the people that now try to invoke the streisand effect against them are not even touching their claim, however valid or invalid or may be. If anything, they make the hashtag more valuable for advertisers.
This reminds me of incidents in the past were colors (some special shade of magenta, Deutsche Telekom) or letters (greek alpha, Canon) were trademarked, apparently without much discussion. As I understood it, the reason was that a trademark does not forbid general use by the public. It "only" forbids using it as brand identifiers and for advertising.
Whether hashtags can actually be trademarked is of course a different question. But I don't see how it would be more crazy than trademarking a color.
[1] https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761406212122431488
So what if they're "right"? They still lost.
In my view, a hashtag DOES NOT identify a source. It merely identifies a topic. The @EdmondActive is the source identifier. Companies AND the USPTO are not well informed on topics such as this.
Think about color for a moment. If you see a brown cargo van, do you immediately think of UPS? It is likely. When you see magenta in the realm of wireless carriers, do you immediately assume it is in connection with T-Mobile? In lesser known niche markets, the color of a product is even more identifiable and, thus, protectable.
If I were to launch a parcel delivery company, use brown cargo trucks, and clothe my drivers in brown uniforms, consumers would likely confuse my delivery company for UPS, and I would be freeriding on the goodwill that they have created with consumers.
Hence, colors are rightfully protected. Hashtags should not be.
So it doesn't have to be within the same type of business - it just has to be likely to cause confusion.
(In the case of UPS brown, it would make sense that it can't be used by another delivery service on their trucks, given how prominent it is to the UPS brand. But for a grocery store, for instance, that color wouldn't cause confusion.)
"In 2013 the first US applications to trademark hashtags started being submitted. And while it's impossible to stop ordinary people talking about the event online using registered hashtags, it is now possible to restrict what companies do."
Rio2016 is also a little insane. I guess no one else is going to rio in 2016.
You're falling into the same trap as some a few others -- a generic term doesn't necessarily disqualify it from being trademarked.
Trademarks only affected another business's use of that trademark, not individual people. Its truly comical that people don't understand this.
From the comments made in the thread by Edmond, this does not appear to be the case in this circumstance, and the tweet is a genuine case of marketing ignorance.
They got everyone, hook, line, and sinker.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I agree with your parent post, this has been done intentionally to get people to use #shopedmond.
Any publicity is a good publicity. Unless it's an obituary.Which, IMO, is a lousy theory. Publicity is supposed to serve an end. Publicity that does not do so is useless at best. Many circles of marketing seem to have turned publicity into an end itself.
That said, a lot of times if you see publicity for sake of publicity, there's someone there making ad-dollars on eyeballs. Here any publicity really is good publicity.
Kleenex e.g. must fight the conception that their trademarked name is a generic term for a tissue.
However, the city on question is Edmond, OK and they're encouraging you to shop there, so erm, "shop edmond". Not exactly a convincing trademark.
It seems the owner of the mark is only claiming ownership in oklahoma (which may be why the mark isn't found in the USTPO lists)
http://newsok.com/article/5512593
EDIT: I'd be interested to know if these tweets fall foul of US rules about promoted content.
And,,, seriously though, this is why technology is NOT democratic by default, and why people must actively, forcefully work to democratize technology based social, community, and cultural infrastructure. If it can't be found outside of human civilization in a form ready to be picked up or stumbled over, and someone gets to it before you, they'll likely claim it for their own. Lame.
Although to be fair he wanted to stop businesses using it not the public in general, but why let the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned rabble rousing.
[1] https://issuu.com/edmondactive/docs/edmondactive_janfeb2014 (pg 3. Note down the bottom of that page they claim the trademark to #shopedmond"
contractor - business?, employee acting on behalf of business, employee at work but not work related, self-employed person in unrelated field, person how use of hashtag gets them noticed and hired, etc.
Any of those who change over time. I hashtaged when I was the public but now I'm head of marketing at competitor.
HN comments are mostly quality when on topic, but toss out another discipline that people assume to understand with their common knowledge and.. well, here we are.
What do they sell?
How long have they been around?
Do you think their product is ok even if they do silly things on twitter?
Edmond is a special place that you must understand to make any sense of this story. It is effectively Republican Heaven. It is a small town, well-eduated, white, wealthy, growing, and suburban. Lots of small business owners and people who have made their own $1M, which they naturally achieved through some combination of hard work and attending church regularly so that your customers and business partners will trust you. Cost of living is shockingly low. All the economic, racial, and social issues in our country are happening somewhere else very far away, and the biggest threat Edmond faces is that the faraway people may and/or already have begun to change things and therefore ruin Republican Heaven.
This company exists in that context, capitalizing on a high concentration of small business owners, offering them what effectively amounts to advertising services that theoretically convert into walkins to your hair salon or whatever.
Edmond has a strange relationship with social media. On the one hand, social media is big business, and big business is always, always good. On the other hand, social media was created by a bunch of faraway Blue-State Liberal Commies. So in general they would be one part in favor of exploiting it, one part completely ignorant about how to do that, and one part determined to do it differently than the Liberal Commies do.
All of that to say, forming a cartel around a hashtag is an entirely plausible business model for Edmond. If a business used it without paying, well, that's cheating, and cheating is a sin, and you'll never sin your way to making your $1M. All you have to do is put out a passive aggressive note reminding people you have a trademark or something and the bad actors will be sufficiently shamed to change their ways.
And the social media backlash is, obviously, just a bunch of Blue-State Liberal Commies who live too far to visit your hair salon anyway, so nobody cares about them or their opinions.
The real problem this company faces is proving that a hashtag translates into increased hair salon appointments, which is the kind of problem Edmond actually cares about. Small business owners take much more seriously than SV culture the concept of value for money. If it's not effective advertising it will be dead in the water, with or without any help from outside.
I understand how it could be read as a bit of a partisan attack, particularly around this time of year. In reality though, I think every place has its own dysfunction. It's just that Edmond's particular dysfunction is both important to understanding the story, and very foreign to HN readers, whereas detailing the dysfunctions of other areas might "provide balance" but would not help anyone make sense of this story.
But to provide balance anyway, Edmond is very different than most people's idea of "red area". The population is very highly educated. The public school system is universally loved, and there's even a public university that is excellent. So when you hear someone express their hatred for "big government" it is in the context of empowering a local government that provides actual services that are very competently administrated, not, e.g. a desire to burn everything down.
It is also one of the only semi-urban areas I can think of where minimum wage is definitely a living wage, jobs are available to anyone who wants to work, "corporation" means your next-door neighbor's 10-employee plumbing company, etc. So I think an argument can be made that "red" policies make much more sense there than otherwise expected.
It is really the sort of place that produces a William Buckley [0]. It's a pragmatic, intellectual, moderate branch of conservatism, that is growing concerned about its own extinction. Based on this election, I think it's a pretty justified fear.
Maybe the small effect of voting with my wallet would be more likely to be noticed if I sent a note: "Hi there, because of $ACTION_I_DISAGREE_WITH, I've decided not to patronize your business anymore"