




Father Strand mentioned the letter at his Sunday Mass.

Speaking to the

Best Buy told reporters for the 



Comments     Threshold


owning a trademark
By paydirt on 8/16/2010 1:00:52 PM , Rating: 3
owning a trademark without making a point of defending it does subject you to the risk of not being able to defend it when it really matters, right?

RE: owning a trademark
By ppardee on 8/16/2010 1:22:21 PM , Rating: 2
IIRC from my trademarks/copyrights/patents class, you're right. The real question is do they have a valid case? I would imagine this would qualify as Fair Use.

The purpose of the trademark is to ensure that the company can maintain its reputation with consumers. A restaurant can't call itself McDonald's if it is not a registered franchise. This would damage McDonald's and also the consumer (since they were expecting a different product).

The priest isn't competitor, the logo isn't likely to cause brand confusion, but the courts have a tendency to side with the owner of the trademark in even the most ridiculous cases, like with White vs Samsung.

RE: owning a trademark
By dlapham on 8/16/2010 1:35:10 PM , Rating: 3
Darn, I hope they don't find out about my church McDonald road.

RE: owning a trademark
By knutjb on 8/16/2010 5:06:47 PM , Rating: 1
I don't know about the rest of you but I remember hearing the term "God Squad" long before I ever heard of "Best Buy," let alone "Geek Squad."

The logo and the car are kind a pushing it but at the expense of bad publicity what were the bozos at BB smoking? Does BB really think this is a good idea... The only confusion I see here belongs to BB and the goof squad.

RE: owning a trademark
By maverick85wd on 8/16/10, Rating: 0
RE: owning a trademark
By Suntan on 8/16/10, Rating: -1
RE: owning a trademark
By nolisi on 8/17/2010 11:56:01 AM , Rating: 5
Heaven forbid a priest try to make Christianity a little more accessible with a bit of humor and/or tongue-in-cheek advertising. But there are a fair number of intolerant (to things like religion) liberals there in Richfield, MN. I wouldn’t doubt it that he was served because he was a man of religion as much as anything else.

While I highly approve your use of irony in that statement ("Heaven forbid a priest"), I do disapprove of your blind bias toward anything liberal. Liberals did not serve him a lawsuit, a corporation did. In case you aren't aware, large scale corporate interests are usually on the conservative side. And we're talking about Best Buy, a company who, as recently as this year, donated money to conservative causes.

But nice try trying to pin everything under the sun on liberals.

RE: owning a trademark
By Suntan on 8/17/2010 1:31:17 PM , Rating: 2
A person can have “conservative” ideals to things like business while having “liberal” ideals to things like religion. That is why I stated it as I did.

I work a couple blocks from the BB headquarters. I’m just making a comment based on my opinion of the people that live in the area. I’m not making a comment based on all liberals and all conservatives the world over.


RE: owning a trademark

