Not that I am disparaging lawyers, I almost was one myself.
I spotted this post from Zen Habits:
Is a book title even a trademark?
Can anyone enlighten me as to whether the author has any hope of enforcing this?
I've never been to law school or antthing, but I know a little about IP law (Intellectual Property - copyrights, patents, trademarks - and there's a few other legal things such as trade dress, but that's not important now).
That book "Feel the fear and do it anyway" was a big seller, I even read it way back when (and no, it didn't change MY life), and a book title (or most any word or sequence of words when used for a specific product or service) CAN be a trademark simply by registering it at the trademark office. See
http://uspto.gov I thnk a trademark costs in the hundreds of dollars to register (and then more to protect, paying lawyers to write nastygrams like this), but it's not much compared to what that book surely earned.
Her lawyers asked me to insert the (R) symbol after the phrase, in my post, and add this sentence: “This is the registered trademark of Susan Jeffers, Ph.D. and is used with her permission.”
Yeah. I’m not gonna do that.
Oh my. I hope this Leo person (is that male or female?) has some free time to sit in court, or free money to pay an attorney or some such.
I find it unbelievable that a common phrase (that was used way before it was the title of any book) can be trademarked.
But it's true, and company lawyers have bullied their way onto even more territory than the law perhaps intended. They often don't NEED to prove infringement in court - if they bully enough, they can get the other party to believe they'll lose in court, so they back down rather than defend what may legitimately be an unrelated use of the word or phrase. Not that I would ever name a company that would stoop to these techniques.
As much as I hate to say it, this person may have awakened a
Monster(R)[TM]*
But still, even though the author and publisher may be on firm legal ground (at least in this case, much more so than the Monster cases I read about), I think it's just a little bit overbearing and mean-spirited to use the registered title to harass bloggers like this.
No doubt the author/publisher/attorney involved has the words Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway stuck in a Google Alerts, and will get an email linking to this thread as a mention of the title "Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway." Not that I'm trying to attract them here or anything...
The very word Monster(R)[TM] is a Registered Trademark of Monster Cable. Just ask just about any company that has ever had Monster in its company or product name. And yes, that company sued Disney over an animated film because the title was "Monsters, Inc." !!!