This Guy Trademarked the Symbol for Pi and Took Away Our Geeky T-Shirts | Hacker News Reader

This Guy Trademarked the Symbol for Pi and Took Away Our Geeky T-Shirts

wired.com

79 pointsColinWright21 comments

What bothers me almost as much is that an actual, bar-card-carrying attorney demanded that a company cease "copyright infringement" on the basis of a trademark.

Do lawyers face any repercussions for representing frivolous cases that are used as an abusive tactic?

Theoretically yes, in practice? depends on who they piss off

It can hurt their reputation, at the very least. Beyond that, I doubt it.

Depends who they piss off to some degree. If a successful claim can be made that they are being unethical they can also be disbarred.

As far as the NY attorney database shows, there is only one licensed attorney with that name, and he works for a bank, and so likely does not deal with IP law. Plus, the fact that a home address is used on the letterhead suggest that he may have written it as a favor to a friend.

Although admittedly, an attorney practicing in a area that isn't his area of expertise is not much better (and maybe worse).

Interestingly, most of the letter seems to have been taken from [1] and [2]. Yes, it's copyright infringement. No, most lawyers don't care if copyright of their legal documents have been infringed.

[1]: https://www.z2systems.com/np/publicaccess/neonPage.do?pageId... [2]: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TjCi1WP...

This has no legs, obviously. As Lemley points out, one of the basic principles of trademark law is that the mark must function as a source identifier. You can't even trademark "t-shirts with 'pi' followed by a period" if it's used in a context where it's not functioning as a brand.

And yet despite it having no legs, here it is doing real damage to real people trying to sell real products they designed, while spending their real resources to fight this obviously toothless claim in the courts.

This is one of the many reasons why the US legal system is broken, and backwards.

It didn't have to cause any harm; Zazzle did not have to react the way it did.

Yeah, maybe their lawyers advised Zazzle "not to risk it" and take down all the pi products. That is what lawyers are paid to do, but that doesn't make it the right business decision.

Lawsuit are not the only risk; by acting so foolishly, Zazzle pissed off a bunch of customers and generated a ton of bad press for themselves.

There's no actual claim that anybody is spending any money to fight in any courts. Just a nastygram to a website that took down the products proactively. Every western country has trademark laws, and you could send a similar letter in any of them.

It has already caused people to do work they otherwise wouldn't have had to. And what are the odds that the trademark holder will give up without litigation?

But I agree that this isn't specific to the US.

If this is a gimmick to highlight the incompetency of the USPTO it's a clever one. Not only has ineptitude been used to secure trademark of one of the oldest known symbols in common use but that legal status is being being put to work threatening companies into halting sales and opening their books. The corporate inconvenience and money flushing could theoretically escalate and result in at least a tiny bit more scrutiny of how trademarks are issued.

More than likely it's a very enterprising young man interested in getting into the same game as the patent trolls though using a different sort of legal monopoly.

There's nothing wrong with common symbols being trademarked. The purpose of trademarks is to prevent misrepresentation of origin and consumer confusion. If a company uses a common symbol to mark their products and this distinguishes them from competing products, it would make no sense to not allow them a trademark.

Keep in mind that trademarks are limited to particular areas of commerce. If someone got a trademark on π as the name of a line of condoms, for instance, that would not prevent anyone from using π as the name of a line of fishing poles.

The problem here is not with a common symbol being trademarked. The problem here is that "π." does not do a good job of identifying a line of clothing, because there have been plenty of prior lines of clothing that have included "π" on them.

I wonder what font was used for the mark and if it has been appropriately licenced.

edit - is the pi character from Times New Roman

http://www.trademarks411.com/marks/85785006-pi

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pi_uc_lc.svg

I'm gonna trademark <a href= and see if I can get the internet turned off

Time to get a trademark on Tau before it takes off.

2π-ssed to do it now.

Crazy how these broad trademarks are allowed. Despair Inc (home of hilarious "demotivational" posters) registered the frowny emoticon some time ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despair,_Inc.#Other_works). They did it more as a publicity stunt to my understanding. The press release threatening to sue people who used it on their less favorite IM programs or in hideous font faces like comic sans was hilarious.

Blessing in disguise- "pi" as a cultural touchstone is the dumbest thing. Nobody's impressed that you know one thing about a circle.

Admit that it's at least slightly better than seeing E=mc^2 tagged on everything though...

Follow up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830737

Hmmm I guess its about time that Greece starts claiming those copyrights! Who knows we might exit crysis at the end of the day! Lets start by copyrighting Democracy!...

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