Seattle’s new Hotel Hotel. Catchy (though unprotectable) name.
Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood has new accommodations: Hotel Hotel.
It’s a cute name, if not downright fashionable.
The problem is that if it succeeds, anyone can copy it. That’s because the trademark is generic. (For those nonlawyers out there, a generic trademark denotes the category of good or service, rather than a particular source of goods or services within that category. For that reason, it can’t serve as a trademark or be protected as one, no matter how well known it gets. Think you could protect TELEVISION as a brand of TVs?)
I’ve looked for the generic BEER beer of my youth. Or, should I say, beer that I noticed at the supermarket when I was a kid. Generic beer that actually said BEER in black letters on the can. That’s always epitomized generic trademarks for me.
Until now.
I hope Hotel Hotel is great success. (So far, the reviews are good.) The downside is if it catches on, it’ll have imitators it can do nothing to stop.