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Recommend NYT Best-seller Illustrates How Trademarks Can Become Meaningless (Email)

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I’m pleased to report that excerpts from a 2011 Seattle Trademark Lawyer post appear in the 2016 NYT best-seller, “Real Food/Fake Food.”

Author Larry Olmsted riffs on my discussion about “American” Kobe beef. I like what he’s done.

The point of the post, and one of the points of the book, is that marketing labels stop meaning anything when they are stretched beyond their original designations. Kobe beef is a case in point. It used to designate special (and especially tasty) beef raised in Kobe, Japan. But when it shows up on menus as “American” Kobe beef, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office allows different producers to register trademarks like “AMERICAN STYLE KOBE BEEF,” “AMERICAN CERTIFIED KOBE BEEF,” and “PREMIER AMERICAN KOBE BEEF,” the Kobe beef designation no longer means what it used to. Indeed, it arguably no longer means anything at all.


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