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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

Trademarks are lost when they are not defended. That is entirely separate from fair use in copyright law.

This explains why Apple has sued The Onion a dozen or so times for all the parodies that infringed on trademarks belonging to the corporation.

https://theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-lapt...

https://theonion.com/new-ipad-offers-3-months-of-something-c...

Trademark is about preventing someone's brand for being confused for another. Unless someone was confusing this for being an official IKEA product I'm not sure why it would be in the ballpark of trademark.

There is also trade dress of course but that isn't really related.

No, tradmarks can be parodied too. It's a first amendment protection, and extremely common in movies, TV and video games.

If the developer worked with a lawyer they could've gotten any suit by IKEA (this wasn't a suit yet, just a cease and desist letter) quickly dismissed.

> It's a first amendment protection

FWIW: Ziggy, the developer, is based in the UK.

Oh, I must have missed that

In that case yeah, it certainly depends on what the local laws say. I think in the UK parody protection applies to copyright but not trademarks.

This is an often repeated statement online (like “fiduciary duty”) that way over emphasizes the risk. Parody media poses absolutely no risk to their trademark, not even a tiny bit of incremental “damage.”

Companies don’t need to be bulliest the vast majority of the time they act like one. We need to stop parroting this excuse for them.

IANAL but I heard the creators of Robot Chicken (an animation show that parodies many big franchises) that they have to be very careful to make sure they can claim what they do is parody. As I understood, and to my best recollection, they cannot just use e.g., Batman in an original funny context… they need to actually comment on Batman (existing storylines, characters, tropes, cliches, mythology) in their sketch. That said, we know that some IP lawyers will just send a Cease & Desist because it costs them nothing, it’s more defensible, and they don’t risk any penalties.

A bit of a tangent to Weird Al, who often is said to not need the permission of the original artist because his songs are parodies, usually isn't commenting on the actual content of the original song but instead takes the lyrics and gives them a different theme. 'Smells like Nirvana' is one of the few songs he does that actually does directly parody the original. His videos are far more parody than the songs themselves. Makes me wonder where the legal line actually is drawn and if asking permission is actually because it would be too risky not to.

(Not sure if you were saying this in your comment) I read somewhere that Weird Al always asks permission before releasing a parody song.

IIRC, the same article/post also said that some other prominent parody artists (Stan Freberg might have been an example) generally did not.

There's a pretty famous story about Weird Al's Amish Paradise and Coolio. Weird Al got permission from the recording company and producer, but not Coolio. Coolio was not amused, initially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_Paradise#Coolio's_respon...

My understanding is that a parody has to actually parody the original work. There's a distinction between "parodying" and "using the songwriting with different lyrics". You see a lot of people doing riffs on "What a Wonderful World" and getting shut down by the Louis Armstrong estate, e.g.

Always been curious - what are some examples of trademarks being lost due to not being defended?

There's lots and lots of them. Have you ridden an escalator® lately?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

Very interesting link. I am now confused and intrigued that the trademark for "heroin" is listed as being revoked as part of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.

Part VIII, Annex VI on reparations: Germany was forced to renounce trademark rights on pharmaceutical and chemical products in favor of the Allied powers, so Bayer's Aspirin and Heroin were included.

Though that is not the type of abandonment that IKEA is worried about in this case. In fact it isn't really clear what form of trademark abandonment IKEA would have to be concerned about for this action to be justified. IANAL but IKEA is definitely not worried about the trademark being ruled abandoned due to non-use, procedural issues or naked licensing; they can easily prove the mark(s) are in active use, and the other two are not related to trademark enforcement.

Again, IANAL but we do need to stop spreading FUD about what trademarks entail. Trademarks are meant to protect a brand from being diluted or confused, not to police the world of all parody or reference to some thing. In fact, if the store in the game wasn't even called an IKEA, I am really curious what "trademark" they felt it violated, but unfortunately not curious enough to find out.

P.S.: a better example of a trademark that fell to non-use would be "Twitter". However I personally dunno if there is a trademark that fell specifically because they didn't bully enough people who tried to use their trademark in ways that wouldn't be confused with their brand. That seems to be a made-up invention by corporate lawyers that people just accept at face value. If it really worked this way, the mark "JavaScript" should've fallen a long time ago.

Just waiting for The Coca Cola company to sue Bethesda for having Nuka Cola.

Why? There are a lot of colas around the world.

Whom they often sue. 100% they would would consider the logo/branding/bottle infringing if they were a competing product.

Sue for using “cola” in the product name? Citation most definitely needed.

Is that what I said?

Fallout 4 parodies the potential legal issue itself in one of its loading screens:

Nuka-Cola's signature rocket-shaped bottle replaced the traditional curved bottle when a rival corporation successfully sued for patent infringement. Fortunately, the public saw the new bottle as an improvement and Nuka-Cola's sales increased.

They’ll probably want to go after Jones Soda first. :eyeroll:

https://www.amazon.com/Jones-Soda-Fallout-Nuka-Cola-Flavored...

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