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Consumer Reports


Hormel fights to protect SPAM trademark

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) AUSTIN, Minn. - In the land of SPAM, where plastic pigs are painted to glorify the wonders of pork and where, when the wind blows in from the north, Main Street smells just like grandpa's favorite breakfast, don't bother complaining to most people about all those files crowding your e-mail.

"It's lunchmeat," declared Carol Cromwell, sitting next to a computer at her downtown fitness center. No question about it.

And so it is in Austin, otherwise known as SPAMTOWN, USA, a thriving community of 23,000 in southeast Minnesota where the salty meat stuffed in the blue and yellow can is undeniably the local economic meal ticket, if not the unanimous culinary favorite.

The residents of Austin are not mired in denial when it comes to the double meaning of spam, but in this most company of company towns, the term for unwanted e-mail is viewed as an Internet interloper. The term spam is important here, which is why people pay attention to the legal effort by Hormel Foods Corp. to prevent a tiny Seattle technology company, SpamArrest LLC, from keeping a trademark it obtained on spam-related software.

While the legal brouhaha is steeped in the arcana of trademark law - upper-case SPAM vs. lower-case spam, and generic or descriptive use of the term vs. applying a trademark to a particular product - this is all about a World War II generation icon butting heads with the sassy, New Age cyber-lingo. Seventy-percent of SPAM's U.S. sales are to people 45 years old and older, according to Hormel.

The meaning of the term is shifting.

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"They're saying because spam is a term for e-mail that they can take it and trademark it. What they're doing is stealing some of our equity," said Kevin Jones, assistant secretary and senior attorney for Hormel, which is headquartered in Austin. "We coined the term 66 years ago ... and we stand behind the reputation of that word."

"It's one thing to have a slang term. It's another to commercially exploit it," Jones said.

Copyright battles are common. The women's lingerie specialist Victoria's Secret recently lost its battle to prevent Victor's Little Secret, a Kentucky-based sex toy retailer, from using a similar moniker on its adult novelty store. Big companies like McDonalds Corp. and Walt Disney Co. keep their trademark attorneys busy protecting their trademark names - and their reputations - from copycat competitors.

But the fight over spam adds a new twist because the reputation of the word is not simply linked to the 6 billion cans of meat that have been sold since 1937 or the Monty Python comedy skit that many, including Hormel, believe gave birth to the term for junk e-mail. The use of the term is rapidly gaining prominence in the public arena and the notoriety of spam has prompted more than 30 states to enact laws intended to stem the tide of unwanted and often pornographic e-mail messages.

"Everybody refers to it as spam. Judges call it spam. You ask people on the street, everybody tells you it's the stuff that hits your e-mail boxes. It is generic," said Derek Newman, a Seattle attorney representing SpamArrest, which is marketing computer software designed to block spam.

"SpamArrest is referring to the generic spam," Newman added. "No one can look at SpamArrest and think it has anything to do with lunchmeat."

Except at the corner of Main Street and SPAM Boulevard, the SPAM Museum, where Jones argues there could be great confusion if SpamArrest is allowed to obtain a trademark. If the software is poor quality, Jones said, the public might wonder why Hormel is in that business or why Hormel would name its product after junk e-mail.

All of this will get batted around before the Trademark Trial and Appeals Court in Washington, which is not expected to hear the matter until next year. Hormel said it does not object to the slang use of the term spam, but its two challenges to SpamArrest applications for software trademarks - one of which has already been granted - reflects the company's intent to protect its trademark.

This is not the first time Hormel has challenged companies on the use of its trademark term. Jones said the company successfully fought Yahoo and other Internet service providers that wanted to trademark products with the term spam.

"The brand is a bundle of associations. That's where you get the value," Jones said. He acknowledges the slang term spam has a negative connotation and that the company does not object to people using it. But elevating the stature of junk e-mail products to trademark status would put the value of Hormel's trademark on a "slippery slope," he said.

SpamArrest said their use has nothing to do with Hormel or the luster of a product that has lost its former singular identity with the emergence of the Internet and the passing of older generations that grew up on the canned meat.

"The lawyers are trying to protect something that is gone," Newman countered. "Even older folks who eat SPAM, like my mother-in-law, don't think of it as lunchmeat. They think it is something that is annoying that hits their e-mail."

The different meanings of the term set this case apart from other disputes over trademarked products like Band-Aids, Xerox, Velcro, Cadillac and "Star Wars." In each of those cases, however, the competing use of the word was very close or identical to the original.

Spam, as in junk mail, is overwhelmingly reviled by computer users. A recent Harris Poll showed nearly three-quarters of Americans favor making spam illegal. Ninety-six percent say spam is annoying.

"It almost seems like they both have a negative connotation," quipped Tyson Schumacher, one of the few in Austin who first thinks of spam as junk e-mail. Schumacher is a computer technician. On Main Street, where flowers bloom from hanging pots on handsome street lights, there's a lot of sympathy for the company that created the word based on a product of shoulder pork and ham that morphed into SPAM.

"Hormel has given back to this community and I can't say that I blame them for what they're doing," Brian Blecker, a real estate broker, said at his office. "I think SpamArrest just wants to cash in."

But even Blecker said the quick and enthusiastic association that SPAM is first lunchmeat and then, much later, e-mail, is probably confined to SPAMTOWN.

"As you move away from here," he added, "I think you'll find that changes.

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