This morning, the Seattle Times wrote about the Hormel v. Spam Arrest decision as part of its “Sunday Buzz” feature. As discussed here, Seattle-based Spam Arrest won the proceeding, enabling it to keep its federal registration for SPAM ARREST in connection with software that fights unsolicited commercial email.
The decision involving Spam Arrest marked the “first and only” win a software company has had over Hormel, the maker of SPAM canned meat, over the everyday use of the word “spam” in a trademark to refer to unsolicited commercial email.
The article quotes me as saying this is the first time I can think of in which a trademark became a common word not through genericide (as happened with aspirin and escalator) but through mutation. Spam Arrest doesn’t use “spam” to refer to canned meat — a proprietary use Hormel retains — but to mean unsolicited commercial email.
“Hormel has tried to put the genie back in the bottle” by attacking anti-spam software companies’ use of the term, but the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s decision found Hormel “does not have a monopoly over ordinary English words, which the trademark board found spam was.”
Hormel’s hometown newspaper, the Star Tribune, describes the dispute here. The TTABlog discusses it here.