By Chris Williams for The
Register.
This article has been reproduced with permission.
Hormel grip on pork meat slips
It has settled an 18-month dispute with US foodstuffer Hormel
over the right to use the popular term for unsolicited email in
naming its product Bopspam. Hormel lawyers discovered they were not
as likely to stop NetBop registering the name as they had thought,
when Patent Office officials indicated NetBop were likely to win at
a preliminary hearing.
The settlement reached by the two firms means NetBop can use
'spam' to name its product, as long as it keeps it lowercase and
does not emphasise it in any other way.
NetBop MD Andrew Downie said: "We would never have dreamed there
would be such an issue with securing a created name which contains
a word used in peoples' every day lives."
"This shows that even a business based in Swansea can triumph
against a large US Corporation who has previously won objections
against many trade marks over the past few years, including those
proposed by AOL and Cloudmark."
Minnesota-based company has tried to maintain a tight grip on
SPAM®, going after firms that deploy the word in its email context.
Their website says: "We do not object to use of this slang term to
describe UCE [unsolicited commercial email], although we do object
to the use of our product image in association with that term."
Hormel recently
lost another trademark case which it took to the High Court
against Antilles Landscapes Investments' use of the word 'spam' in
the logo for Spambuster.
© The Register
2006
