–Susan Perera, Attorney
Last Wednesday I wrote about t
he parody fair use defense to trademark infringement in connection with the Facebook v. Lamebook lawsuits. Since then another party has asserted the fair use defense, this time in regards to copyright infringement.
Last week the on-line news source, Gawker, published images of more than
Losing a trademark challenge is bad news, right? It’s costly, it’s embarrassing, and it can damage a brand’s reputation.
And yet in one well-known instance, losing a trademark challenge didn’t hurt a brand at all. In fact, it ensured the brand’s immortality.
The product name I’m thinking of existed for just three years in the 1990s before the death-dealing trademark challenge. The company name survived in slightly altered form; the product name was replaced by a series of successor names.
Now, more than eleven years after that legal defeat, the original product name is still used, erroneously but ubiquitously, to describe an entire class of products—products that themselves exist mostly as fading memories.
What’s the product name?
I’ll give you one more hint: it’s a technology brand.
Answer after the jump.Continue Reading Name That (Zombie) Brand