Cleaning The Fucking Kitchen
The Legal "Saga"
June 10, 2002
Here's what happened:
March 12, 2002
Re: Trademark Infringement
FOR DUMMIES
Cleaning The Fucking Kitchen For Dummies
Sir:
I am the Trademark Administrator of Hungry Minds, Inc.
As you may know, Hungry Minds, Inc., formerly IDG Books Worldwide
Inc., has over 100 trademark registrations and applications in the
United States, Canada and other jurisdictions for the trademark
"FOR DUMMIES," many "DUMMIES" formatives and the FOR DUMMIES trade
dress. The For DummiesŪ trademark appears not only on the books,
but on CD-ROMs, trade and consumer advertising, in catalogues,
point of sale displays, Hungry Minds' websites, and other
promotional and licensed material distributed around the world.
This series has been in existence since 1991 and has enjoyed
tremendous success. In fact, there are over 100 million For
DummiesŪ books in print, which have been translated into 38
languages.
The trademark rights established by Hungry Minds in connection with
the For DummiesŪ series cover a wide variety of goods and services,
topics and subject matters. As such, Hungry Minds, and its
authorized representatives, have the exclusive right under
trademark law to use these marks to distinguish its goods and
services from third parties.
United States trademark law prohibits anyone other than Hungry
Minds from using its marks, or any marks that are confusingly
similar, in connection with goods or services when such use is
likely to cause confusion as to the source, sponsorship or
affiliation of the goods or services and requires that Hungry Minds
take all reasonable steps to prevent others from using its marks
without authorization. In addition, the law prohibits the use of a
famous mark in such a way as to "dilute" its distinctiveness as an
exclusive designator of the owner's goods and services. When such
dilution occurs, the mark can become a "generic" term used in
connection with goods or services from many different sources, and
the owner may therefore lose its exclusive right to use it. Hungry
Minds has made a considerable investment in promoting its For
DummiesŪ trademarks and, as a result, it is clear that the For
DummiesŪ trademarks are universally associated with Hungry Minds.
In short, this trademark is an extremely valuable asset of our
company.
Hungry Minds recently became aware of your web site,
http://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/kitchen.html which features your
work entitled "Cleaning The Fucking Kitchen For Dummies." Hungry
Minds finds your use of the "For Dummies" trademarks and trade
dress in this work to be disparaging of our famous FOR DUMMIESŪ
brand and asserts that there exists a likelihood of confusion and
tarnishment in connection with the your use of our marks on your
website in this manner. If your use tarnishes the image of our
trademarks by attaching a negative association therewith, your use
is infringing use of our famous marks.
Accordingly, it is Hungry Minds position that your continued use of
For DummiesŪ in the above-referenced manner on your website
infringes, dilutes and tarnishes Hungry Minds' trademarks and is
disparaging to our reputation. In order to fully protect its
valuable trademarks, Hungry Minds cannot permit such use to
continue.
Because of the significant efforts Hungry Minds has undertaken to
promote and protect our trademarks, we trust that you can
appreciate our concerns. We hope that this matter can be resolved
quickly and amicably. Accordingly, we request that you remove all
references to For DummiesŪ and related logos and trade dress from
the above-mentioned webpage and provide Hungry Minds with written
assurance no later than April 9, 2002 that you will refrain from
using its trademarks in the future.
We appreciate your creativity, but we must protect our trademarks.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to
hearing from you.
To which I sent back something about the Berne Convention and how satire was usually considered "fair use". I didn't hear back for ages, so I assumed I had a point, but then I got...
May 29, 2002
Re: Trademark Infringement
FOR DUMMIES
Cleaning The Fucking Kitchen For Dummies
Mr. ...:
I am in receipt of your March 22, 2002 letter regarding the
above-referenced matter. While we are appreciative of your claims
that your use of the FOR DUMMIESŪ trademarks and trade dress is for
satirical purposes, this assertion does not mean that it is
automatically fair and non-infringing. Parody or satire is
literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of
an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule. However, unless
the trademark or owner of the trademark is at least in part the
target of the parody, your work does not qualify as fair use as a
parody or satirical work in the legal sense. Therefore, if you
appropriate our FOR DUMMIESŪ trademarks and trade dress, not to
parody our products or company, but only as a prominent means to
satirize and poke fun at something or someone else in society, this
does not qualify as fair use.
Although you may continue to present the defense that your use is a
parody or satirical, these types of use may still be considered to
be infringing if they result in an increased likelihood of
confusion. If your use is found to dilute the selling power of our
trademarks your use is no longer defensible under these defenses
and claims of fair use. Trademark owners have protection against
use of their marks on materials that are capable of tarnishing the
image of the trademark or the company. Associating our trademarks
with the vulgar language used throughout your website is, in fact,
tarnishing to our marks and our company image and can dilute the
selling power of our trademarks. Accordingly, we cannot allow such
use to continue.
Again, in order to protect our trademarks, we must reiterate our
requests that you immediately cease using all FOR DUMMIES
trademarks and related logos and trade dress. Please confirm no
later than June 11, 2002 that you have removed all FOR DUMMIES
trademarks, logos and trade dress from your website.
So there you have it. From what I can gather, this is true. Petty and irritating, but true, and there's not much I can do about it; I lose money on this website, I can't afford to defend it in court. (Not that it's likely that it would go to court because I am in a different country, but they could hassle my site providers.)
The fact that using a company's trademarks to satirise that company is allowable use, though, brings up some possibilities.
If there are any people out there who actually know about this sort of thing and can tell me that I can put the original page up again, I'd love to hear from you, but unless that happens it's down.
Curious thing I just noticed
In the second email, the first paragraph is proportionally spaced, but the rest aren't. Curious. The mails were plain-text as well, it's all done with spaces, just as it appears here.