Ohio State University secures trademark for use of the word 'THE' on clothing
dispatch.com
dispatch.com
I saw this as well, it only applies to sports apparel and goods:
> “Ohio State is pleased to have received a trademark for THE on branded products associated with and sold through athletics and collegiate channels,”
They don't literally have a trademark on the word. And if you follow sports the "THE Ohio State University" with an emphasis on "THE" is a thing that is associated with the university. They sell shirts with "THE" in all caps with the university colors and such.
I'd say that if you find this distasteful, I think you're better served arguing against patents and trademarks in general since this seems to my very biased eyes to be reasonable based on the current system we have.
What better way to argue against the absurdity of many patents and trademarks, in general, than to argue against some entity being able to trademark the most common word in the English language!
It's a perfect example of how broken the entire space is.
What do you mean?
I understand that some people associate "THE" with OSU. That's great, really. That does not mean they should be granted a trademark on the most common word in the English language across an entire category of clothing (or, for anything).
Capitalized or not, whether you like football or not, and whether you think it's reasonably associated with OSU or not is immaterial. They were granted a trademark on the most common word in the English language, and that's dumb.
OSU ? Never heard about it. But this happened in the same country which trademarked Windows
Trademarks are usually restricted to tiny, tiny slices of the complete, generic meaning of the trademarked term.
Exactly how many sports clothing items were being sold with only the word "THE" (all caps) on them?
Davis would later go on to play for The Washington Football Team.
It’s the legal equivalent of having the name “the” on NPM.
For example, sportswear that says "THE SPORTSBALL TEAM".
It would be an issue if the shirt was only THE in all caps, and nothing else. And even then it might not be an issue if it were in pink and orange (although it still might).
The analogy with npm works: thesportsballteam is a distinct package.
[1] https://www.nbc4i.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2022/06/th...
[2] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=88571984&caseType=SERIAL_...
[*]: Fair use nonwidthstanding
It feels like half the people replying here have never been the victim of over-zealous patent and/or trademark lawyers before.
OSU just needs to sue whoever puts "THE" on whatever they want, claim that it will confuse people, and then the poor bloke who put "THE" on his coffee mug or whatever has to spend thousands of dollars proving to the courts that a coffee mug wont be confused with a football team. And of course it would never be confused for a football team. Yet, they still have to go through the motions, spend the money, or cease & desist. It happens frequently, frequently enough that there are lawyers specifically known for patent and trademark trolling!
Frivolous trademark and patent lawsuits is a whole damn industry, built upon milking money out of people who cannot reasonably afford to go through an entire trademark/patent dispute without going bankrupt - so they either give up what could potentially be a completely valid use case, or pay some sort of licensing fee they don't need to.
I mean that prior to the granting of this trademark, OSU could not send lawyers my way if I put "THE" on a hat. Now they can.
>Of course frivolous lawsuits and asymmetrical legal costs is a general problem of many modern legal systems, and I'm fine with general arguments about this problem.
General arguments are usually bolstered by specific examples.
>But this is clearly being presented as some extreme ridiculous example of a bad trademark, when it's very much not.
I find it worrisome that so many people think trademarking the word "THE" is somehow not a bad trademark.
What the hell do you consider a bad trademark, if not just the word "the"?
No, prior to the granting of this trademark it was still physically possible for their lawyers to threaten you. They wouldn't have had any legal standing, of course, but they still won't have any legal standing unless your products are likely to confuse consumers.
> General arguments are usually bolstered by specific examples.
Yes, but this is not a specific example of the general argument.
> I find it worrisome that so many people think trademarking the word "THE" is somehow not a bad trademark.
It is not a bad trademark. It is a mark that in some specific circumstances (specified in the trademark) is likely to lead consumers to believe a product's origin is Ohio State University. In those circumstances, it's absolutely reasonable to enforce the trademark. In any other circumstances where consumers are not likely to be confused about the product's origin, no trademark violation has occurred. Again, this is how all trademarks work.
> What the hell do you consider a bad trademark, if not just the word "the"?
One example of a bad trademark would be a mark that does not indicate to consumers anything about a product's origin.
Someone successfully trademarking an already established generic term. Someone trademarking a web framework called REST for example.
*even if you don't see the need for a trademark system, what matters is whether a majority of everybody else does, which it's pretty easy to see they do in a consumerist society.
Except that argument seems to rest on a misunderstanding. They didn't trademark the word, they trademarked the word in a specific context (https://www.gerbenlaw.com/trademarks/universities/the-ohio-s...):
> IC 025. US 022 039. G & S Clothing, namely, t-shirts, baseball caps and hats; all of the foregoing being promoted, distributed, and sold through channels customary to the field of sports and collegiate athletics. FIRST USE: 20050800. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20050800.
Frankly, the way they seem to use it is really odd (https://www.diehardsport.com/college-football/ohio-state-big...). In English, "the" doesn't even really make sense as a standalone word, so I really doubt this trademark conflicts with anything.
And I still think this is absurd.
You made none of that clear in your comment. Your comment read like you think no common words should not be trademarkable, so it would be interesting to know where you think the boundary should be and why it should be there.
> And I still think this is absurd.
We'll, to me, it doesn't seem any more absurd than Apple being able to trademark the word "Apple." The word identifies them in certain narrow contexts, so it makes sense that they can gain the right to prevent others from impersonating them in those narrow contexts, so long as any prior use is respected.
They really do seem to have a trademark on the word "the" when associated with clothing, which is profoundly stupid. It is not a case of trademarking their school name with an article in front, but just the article itself.
I don't feel like looking for the actual trademark or court documents.
If anything I find trademarks to be the least unreasonable part of the whole IP nonsense.
As an example, it seems absurd to me that Disney gets to decide in which works Spiderman can or can't appear (or is that Sony? Why??) when that character is part of our shared culture. At the same time, if anyone can put Spiderman in their stuff, you should at least be able to tell which version of Spiderman you are seeing and if it is an "official" production or an alternate take, and it seems like some form of Trademark could help here.
As a former lawyer, albeit one who never specialized in trademark, I was surprised they were able to pass the bar of descriptiveness. You can't trademark "red chair" for use marketing a red chair since it's just describing the thing.
1: https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Following-backlash-...
Since the US doesn't have an official language, it being a japanese word should pose no barrier to it being a valid descriptive term.
Did you know that there is a band called I used to work in search engines. When you decide to implement stop words, one of the first you define for English is of course the word "the". And then you learn of the band "The The" and you have to design a completely different architecture in order to handle exceptions to the stop word list ;-)Found that mildly ironic
In fact, I wish that Texas would deliberately do this, just to rub it in OSU's face. But then, I don't have to pay for their bills for the lawsuit that would happen...
Luckily I'm not.
AAPL's repeated stepping on the Beatles' record label and holding company called Apple's trademarks were pretty heinous though (so far as trademark abuses go) until they were resolved by AAPL buying out the trademark completely for perhaps half a billion dollars in 2007.
The whole purpose of a trademark is being able to own the name of your product so nobody else can pretend to be you and confuse/steal/defraud your customers.
That doesn't mean that AAPL can stop anybody from selling fruit or calling a completely unrelated product something apple related.
Somebody in the chain at some point shoulda stood up and said, “Nah, this is stupid,” and walked out.
...more interesting part of this article for the people arguing against it is THE granting of THE Marc Jacobs trademark, as that one is not restricted to the athletic market.
Apple has it on iXXX, where XXX are "Pod", "Pad", and "Phone".
There was a comment a few days ago from a sad European student that had made that mistake hoping for a university with plentiful beaches and nice warm weather.
I would also like to draw attention to the distinction between Wake Forest University (of Winston-Salem, NC, via GSO airport) and Wake Forest, NC (closer to RDU airport). The latter was of course the home of the original Wake Forest Baptist Manual Labor Institute.
I’ve had to pick someone up at the wrong airport, you see. It was quite a drive.
Oh and tangentially related but Ohio state is super fucking annoying with their constant insistence that their name be prefixed with "the". It's like the inverse of Apple demanding their product be called just "iphone".
They have THE worst superiority complex for a school who still has more losses to Michigan than wins.