Seattle Trademark Lawyer

Rainier Beer’s logo and Dakine’s design

I went downhill skiing for the first time today.

Woo hoo! I’m hooked. I fell a ton, and my excursion was to what amounted to a bunny hill, but it was a lot of fun!

Ok, enough about me.

Yesterday, I was at an outdoor equipment store getting gear for my trip. I came across something worth mentioning here — a tool for snowboarders that depicted what looked an awful lot like the beloved Rainier Beer logo.

The first thing that struck me was I wasn’t on infringement safari. I wasn’t in a foreign land when I stumbled on this appropriation of a well-known trademark. This was a reputable store selling high-end merchandise from reputable sellers like Dakine, the one selling the “board plate” that called to mind the Rainier Beer design. You don’t spot potential trademark issues in that context every day.

Snowboarders are an irreverent bunch, or so I’ve heard. So they might think calling to mind a beer maker’s logo is desirable. But I’d think others would wonder why a maker of quality equipment would want to trigger thought about an unrelated company’s logo. Isn’t that a little distracting? And amateurish? I suppose that could be part of the allure.

My other impulse was to question whether this use was problematic at all. It probably wouldn’t constitute trademark infringement, since I doubt purchasers would think the maker of Rainier Beer (now Pabst Brewing Co.) had gotten into the business of selling snowboard accessories. (A closer case would be for consumers to wonder whether Pabst licensed the logo or consented to its distorted use.) Dilution probably would be Pabst’s best tool, but I wonder if the Rainier Beer logo — quite well known in Seattle, where the beer used to be brewed — is famous on a nationwide basis, the statutory threshold for dilution protection under the Trademark Dilution Revision Act. I doubt it.

So where would that leave Pabst? Assuming it objected to Dakine’s use, its best bet would seem to be a claim for state law dilution, such as under Washington’s Trademark Act. Its logo almost certainly is famous here, so it probably would garner such protection.

I doubt a court would view Dakine’s use as protectable parody, since it doesn’t simultaneously call to mind the thing being parodied and comment on that thing.

I suppose Pabst may have ok’d Dakine’s use on the theory that it’s free advertising and is beneficial for its beer to be associated with a quality seller to the snowboarding set.

I don’t know, but these things are interesting to think about when not fearing for one’s life on the slopes.