Long Trail Brewing Sues East Coast Apparel Company Over 'Take A Hike' T-Shirt
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The last time we checked in with Long Trail Brewing, the Vermont brewery was busy fighting a Minnesota brewer that had dared to put a stick figure of a hiker on its beer can. It seems that rather than basing its trademark legal expeditions on any real or potential customer confusion, Long Trail views trademark law as a vehicle for monopoly and lawsuit-driven income. Long Trail is certainly not alone in this view, unfortunately, but it does have a penchant for taking this sort of thing to ridiculous lengths.Such as going after an apparel company for a simple t-shirt using an incredibly generic phrase, for instance. Long Trail has initiated a trademark lawsuit with a company called Chowdaheadz because the latter dared to make a shirt with the phrase "Take a hike" on it. As the filing explains, Long Trail has trademarked the phrase for its use and has sold apparel with the phrase on it.8. Long Trail is, and it has been since the 1990's, engaged in the business of selling apparel and other products under the trademark Take a Hike. Since late last century, Long Trail has continuously used the trademark Take a Hike in connection with its apparel, beer and other products.9. Long Trail has expended and continues to expend a substantial amount of resources using, advancing, and promoting its trademark Take a Hike and the products and services with which it uses the trademark.10. Long Trail is engaged in a variety of socially and environmentally conscious efforts in the Vermont community and has used its trademark Take a Hike in support of those efforts. Apparel is indeed among the trademarks Long Trail has for the phrase. However, on so common a phrase as "Take a hike", one imagines the bar for customer confusion is quite high. That is all the more so when the target for an infringement suit, in this case Chowdaheadz, uses the phrase in a way that calls nothing about Long Trail, or any other beer for that matter, to mind. Long Trail can and does attempt to drive the point that its use of the phrase on a number of mediums has created a public association with the brewery... but that's ridiculous. Nobody traveling to the Chowdaheadz website and perusing the cornucopia of apparel it has there, and then coming across the following t-shirt, is going to somehow conclude that there is any association with Long Trail.
If you can find customer confusion in that t-shirt, you've got a brain malfunction. It's also worth noting that there are roughly a zillion companies out there with "Take a hike" t-shirts, so why Chowdaheadz has been singled out for this legal action is puzzling. For its part, Chowdaheadz says it isn't backing down. In its response to Long Trail's initial threats, its legal team said:While we appreciate that your client has used “TAKE A HIKE” on clothing and miscellaneous items for many years, we must point out that the phrase itself appears in every English-language dictionary in publication, and has been in widespread public use since at least as early as 1809. It is the epitome of the type of common, generic phrase that should not be monopolized by a single owner.To illustrate this point, representative examples of clothing items for sale with the phrase “Take a Hike” on them are attached to this letter. You will note that Google retrieved listings for 642,000 such items in 0.46 seconds. You may also note that my client’s item appeared as the top search result, while, in contrast, your client did not appear at all. It's hard to see how a claim of either genericide or that the phrase was generic prior to Long Trail's registration won't be seen to have merit. In other words, Long Trail risks losing its trademark entirely by being the bully. I'm struggling to see how this was anything resembling an intelligent business decision by the brewery.
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posted at: 12:00am on 24-Oct-2017
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How To Avoid Future Krack-Like Failures: Create Well-Maintained 'Fat' Protocols Using Initial Coin Offerings
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It came as something of a shock to learn recently that several hugely-popular security protocols for Wi-Fi, including WPA (Wireless Protected Access) and WPA2, were vulnerable to a key re-installation attack (pdf). A useful introduction from the EFF puts things in context, while more technical details can be found on the krackattacks.com site, and in a great post by Matthew Green. As well as the obvious security implications, there's another angle to the Krack incident that Techdirt readers may find of note. It turns out that one important reason why what is a fairly simple flaw was not spotted earlier is that the main documentation was not easily accessible. As Wired explains:The WPA2 protocol was developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which acts as a standards body for numerous technical industries, including wireless security. But unlike, say, Transport Layer Security [TLS], the popular cryptographic protocol used in web encryption, WPA2 doesn't make its specifications widely available. IEEE wireless security standards carry a retail cost of hundreds of dollars to access, and costs to review multiple interoperable standards can quickly add up to thousands of dollars. The obvious way to avoid this issue is to ensure that key protocols are all freely available so that they can be scrutinized by the greatest number of people. But the Wired article points out that there's a different problem in that situation:Even open standards like TLS experience major, damaging bugs at times. Open standards have broad community oversight, but don't have the funding for deep, robust maintenance and vetting It's another well-known concern: just because protocols and software are open doesn't necessarily mean that people will find even obvious bugs. That's because they may not have the time to look for them, which in turn comes down to incentives and rewards. Peer esteem only goes to far, and even hackers have to eat. If they receive no direct reward for spending hours searching through code for bugs, they may not bother.So if we want to avoid major failures like the Krack vulnerability, we need to do two things. First, key protocols and software should be open and freely available. That's the easy part, since openness is now a well-accepted approach in the digital world. Secondly, we need to find a way to reward people for looking at all this stuff. As Krack shows, current incentives aren't working. But there's a new approach that some are touting as the way forward. It involves the fashionable idea of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) of cryptocurrency tokens. A detailed article on qz.com explains how ICOs can be used to fund new software projects by encouraging people to buy tokens speculatively:The user would pay for a token upfront, providing funds for coders to develop the promised technology. If the technology works as advertised and gains popularity, it should attract more users, thus increasing demand for the token offered at the start. As the token value increases, those early users who bought tokens will benefit from appreciating token prices. It's that hope of future investment gains that would encourage people to buy ICO tokens from a risky venture. But it's not just the early users who benefit from a technology that takes off. A key idea of this kind of ICO is that the coders behind the technology would own a sizable proportion of the total token offering; as the technology becomes popular, and tokens gain in value, so does their holding.This novel approach could be applied to protocol development. The hope is that by creating "fat" protocols that can capture more of the value of the ecosystem that is built on top of them, there would be funds available to pay people to look for bugs in the system, which would be totally open. It's an intriguing idea -- one that may be worth trying given the problems with today's approaches.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
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