NBC sues alleged “trademark squatter” for buying the rights to the name Dunder Mifflin
If trademarks are to be believed, the same parent company owns Dunder Mifflin and the ship from Alien
Aux News nbc
In what appears to be a classic Michael Scott-style bungling, NBCUniversal is currently unable to get the trademark on the name “Dunder Mifflin” (the fictional paper company from The Office) because a different company—Jay Kennette Media Group—actually owns it. That comes from Deadline, which says NBCUniversal is appealing the rejection it received from the U.S. Patent And Trademark Office and suing Jay Kennette Media Group for allegedly being a “trademark squatter” that has “built a business based on registering trademarks belonging to others” and then either selling those trademarks back to their “rightful” owners or actually selling merchandise related to the trademarks.
But one does not become an alleged trademark squatter by owning one trademark, so what else does Jay Kennette Media Group own? Well, according to Trademarkia (which claims to be a “free search engine of publicly available government records,” but might not be 100% accurate) it owns “Tree Hill Ravens” (the basketball team from One Tree Hill), “Dillon Football” (as in Dillon, Texas from Friday Night Lights), “Nostromo” (the ship from Alien), “Super Saiyan” (when Goku’s hair turns yellow), and “Hillman College” (from A Different World), in addition to Dunder Mifflin.
It also apparently used to own “Weyland Yutani” (the evil company from the Alien movies), “Miskatonic University” (where Cthulhu got his degree), and “Tyrell Corporation” (the evil company from Blade Runner). Jay Kennette Media Group may have perfectly legitimate claims to those trademarks, or the website might be wrong. We don’t know. It’s just funny to imagine a universe where the same parent company owns both Dunder Mifflin and the Nostromo.
Excuse us while we go log on to AO3 to start writing that up. We’re thinking Michael as Ripley, Jim as Dallas, Dwight as the android, Toby as the guy John Hurt plays who gets killed by the chestburster…
31 Comments
Hey you have to respect the hustle sometimes. These people are just doing their best with a convoluted system designed to be unfair and confusing.NBC obviously wasn’t offering them enough.
Trademark and domain squatters are such garbage people. On the other hand, hey, good for them.
Yeah, this was my reaction too. Fuck those guys, but fuck those other guys more.Also, how is this even an issue for NBC now? It looks like it was registered in 2016. Maybe if you have a hugely popular show on your network, you tell one of your lawyers to stop randoms from stealing parts of your IP. Do they not have Central Perk registered in perpetuity?
Hey guys, we have this massive show where the whole thing revolves around a fake company. Should someone maybe make sure we have trademarks on that stuff? Nah, don’t worry about it, the network president has his son handling it.
Warner Bros. owns that show, not the network, and WB has the Central Perk trademarks locked down.
You can’t register a Trademark just to have it. You have to show proof that it’s being used in commerce in the category you’re registering it for, and you have to do that again at every 10 year renewal. I do the TMs for my company and the proof is usually pretty simple. Images of products in the categories you’re applying for with the TM on the packaging suffices.NBC has the copyright to Dunder Mifflin, and I’m sure has been using it on merch for years, but that has no bearing on a trademark. Not sure what even prompted them to try and trademark it now.
What prompted them to trademark it now?Money.Someone identified they could make more money on merchandising their properties and finally looked into it.
Yeah, I recognize that trademark law has some significant differences from copyright, and I’m a layman anyway so that’s almost all I know about it. But it still seems like it should have been someone’s job to regularly do whatever maintenance is required to keep their trademarks intact on any still viable product they own. Do they only need the copyright to sell merchandise use the logo in promotional materials?
Basically, copyrights protect intellectual property, and Dunder Mifflin being a fictitious company in a show would be protected by copyright, and not normally Trademark. There’s no reason to TM it really, as NBC already has fully rights to it’s use on any merch it wants to sell, spinoff shows it would want to make, etc. using that name.Trademarks OTOH are meant to protect one company from having another companies that sell similar products confuse the consumer by using a TM very close to their own. TMs are company names, logos, and catchphrases. They can’t be ideas, concepts or other intangible things which are covered by copyrights. That’s why TMs have to be used in commerce or you will lose them. Multiple companies can even trademark the same name so long as their product categories are different. For instance, NBC is one of TMs of National Broadcasting Company and their area of business is TV and radio broadcasting. That wouldn’t stop, say, a construction company called NBC Construction from being able to trademark NBC as well as there is no chance of confusion between the two.That’s really all the USPTO does when you apply for a TM. They check that it doesn’t conflict with an existing TM in the same line of business. If it doesn’t, and you show proof of use in commerce, you get that TM, no matter what it is. So what TM squatters like this guy do is TM a bunch of names and phrases from IPs in the hope the owner of the IP will pay them to transfer the TM to them.Frankly, I don’t see how this would ever work though. The USPTO calls that a Bad Faith Trademark and you can simply report it and the person will lose their TM and usually be fined. If you have the resources, suing makes more sense because the USPTO acts very slowly and you can get additional damages. In this case, I’d bet that someone at NBC got tipped off that this guy had TMed Dunder Mifflin and NBC then applied for the TM after that to help set up their case. There’s no real reason NBC would need to TM Dunder Mifflin otherwise.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel bad for the well-paid entertainment lawyers who fucked up here. Can they both lose somehow?
I don’t really care either way, but guys like this are why you see people like Taylor swift registering every utterance that comes out of their mouth, and why Lucasfilm sends cease and desist letters to kids birthday parties.
I used to work for a company called SMART Technologies (all these years later I still capitalize it like they forced us to). They were developing a web forum called “The SMART Exchange.” Unfortunately, both smartexchange.com and thesmartexchange.com were registered already. So, they wisely registered sexchange.com – an entire department of developers and product managers didn’t clue in until after they had paid for the domain name. It’s gone back now, amusingly.
This made my day
Only thing which is good about these shitty squatters is they turn capitalism against the other capitalists. It’s a “let them fight” type situation, without all the unpleasantness of crushed buildings and squished people left in the wake of giga-sized monsters duking it out… 😛
So I guess this means we’ll never have to hear about The Office ever again, right? Right?Pleeeeeeaaaase?
Can I buy the trademark to Star Wars and bury that fucking corpse?
How often do you hear about a show that ended like ten years ago?
People never stop talking about The Office. It’s all over the place all the time.
It’s funny, right after I posted this I got a reply on another article that was a Micheal Scott .gif.
I am guessing said company is steering clear of anything attached the The Mouse. The Mouse does not fuck around. NBC, apparently, does.
NBC…DTF?
Well, furries.
Somewhere out there is the superior, original British version of this trademark squatter who owns the “Wernham Hogg” trademark.
Oh no. Not again.
Send me a kiss by wireBaby my heart’s on fire!
Not sure why you didn’t just use the USPTO website search. The guys also owns Skynet and Super Saiyan.I’m actually surprised this guy has gotten away with this for so long. Both TM and domain name squatting is illegal in the US. Usually this is a pain in the ass to fight because the registrar is in a foreign country, but this guy out of Delaware.
Delaware. Figures. The amount of crooked people from that tiny state is incredible.
Not a lawyer, but it is my understanding that these suits against squatters are easy to win. That said, lawyers are expensive and the whole reason people do this is to get paid off. It’s not like he is going to start selling DM themed paper products – that would be work. I would guess filing the lawsuit is just leverage to get a better price.
He was selling DM t-shirts, hoodies, etc. At least purporting to anyway. To get a trademark you have to show proof the mark is being used in commerce, in the product category you’re applying for, (I do the TM application prep for my company) and do so again every 10 years thereafter. For my company we provide images of our product packaging using the TM. The reason a lot of squatters register in clothing is because it’s cheap to provide proof of it’s use in commerce. For less than $50 you can get some T-shirts and hoodies custom printed with the logo and slap a printed label on them.This is an obvious bad faith registration and the guy is going to lose the TM. You don’t even have to sue. The USPTO has a way to register complaints against other trademark holders. The USPTO is slooooow though. The reason you sue is to both fast track it and potentially win damages.
In a just world, any IP dispute between a media conglomerate and a trademark squatter would immediately result in the IP going public domain.
If you meet a squatter, marry her.