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Nasir and Matt close out the week by diving into the topic of trademarks to go over unintended negatives and overlooked positives related to trademark filings. Also, the Katy Perry dancing sharks! Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our business podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: And that’s the show. MATT: Happy Wednesday! NASIR: Wait. This is Friday episode. MATT: Oh, yeah. Sorry, I screwed that up. NASIR: It’s okay. MATT: I guess I’m just confused as some of these trademarks we’re going to talk about are leading to confusion. NASIR: What’s the likelihood that you’re confused? MATT: Very likely. Yeah, there you go. There’s a couple of recent stories dealing with trademarks that are, I think, some areas we haven’t talked about in the past so I was just going to kind of discuss them and the first being this beer dispute. So, there’s Lagunitas in Sierra Nevada, both in Northern California, and Lagunitas had filed a trademark for “IPA” which is a type of beer – it’s an India Pale Ale – very popular at this stage, in 2015, very well-known. If you drink beer, everybody knows what that means. It’s a term that is very, very prevalent. And so, they had trademarked the acronym IPA and I guess they had tried to enforce it against Sierra Nevada. Like I said, these are two heavy-hitters in the craft beer industry in the US. I think they are both top ten – maybe even top five – in terms of beer produced for craft breweries in the US. These are two big names that are going at it. So, Lagunitas tried to enforce or protect its trademark of “IPA” against Sierra Nevada. They tried to resolve it, it didn’t work, so they filed a lawsuit and it just completely backfired on Lagunitas. They got all this negative feedback. All these people were saying they’re never going to drink Lagunitas beer ever again which is not true. I hate when people say that, “Oh, I’m never going to do this again!” Like, the next day, you forget about it. NASIR: I say that whenever I have Yelp and Uber which are on my hitlist. MATT: Yeah. For you, it actually holds true. For most people, I don’t think it does. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that. NASIR: I’ll tell you this; I’m never drinking IPA, that’s for sure. MATT: You even said it awkwardly. NASIR: I guess it’s not as funny if people don’t know that I don’t drink at all. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: How do you say it? IPA? What do you say? IPA? MATT: You’re saying, “I’m never drinking IPA.” I think the correct way would be to say “a” – you’re never drinking a IPA. NASIR: Well, I agree. I’m not going to drink an IPA or drink any more IPA types of alcoholic beverages – IPA. MATT: Well, then you would be isolating the IPAs in general. And so, that was what the whole dispute was about. Lagunitas tried to protect this trademark that it had against Sierra Nevada who, I’m sure, produces a bunch of IPAs as well. It’s had a public backlash and now Lagunitas has since pulled its lawsuit and is no longer going to go through that route. So, I guess the moral of the story here is, even when you have some protection over your intellectual property – in this case, being the trademark’s probably going to be where it makes the most sense – it can have negative consequences to have that trademark and sometimes it can even be more of a hassle and a burden than you even want it because, in this case, Lagunitas tried to protect what it owned and it obviously got the negative PR but it’s also just a hassle having to deal with and they dropped the lawsuit. So, whatever money they, in time, dumped into it went all for nothing. NASIR: Yeah, we’ve seen these kinds of public blowbacks in different situations. The one thing that I can remember with any sort of detail, there was a Kitchen Nightmares episode with Gordon Ramsay, they did one restaurant where the local restaurant tried to trademark one local phrase that is very c...