THE KAT THEY COULDN'T SILENCE

IPKat joint Blogmeister Jeremy writes a regular back-page column, "Last Word", for Trademark World. "Last Word" takes a light look at the world of marks, brands and the people who live off them.

Earlier this month, Jeremy submitted an article which poked a little light fun at the remarkably descriptive names that businesses and practices in the field of trade marks sometimes give themselves, as well as the quite silly slogans they either choose or pay consultants to invent for them. He was told that this feature was a bit too hot for a polite and refined periodical such as Trademark World. Could he please tone it down a bit by removing the names of the firms concerned? Well, a little cosmetic editing occurred -- but, if the truth be told, it still wasn't very difficult to identify the names of the various firms. The bottom line is that Jeremy got an email telling him that Trademark World had consulted its lawyers, who had advised them not to publish the piece.

Like most inveterate writers, Jeremy hates to throw anything away once he has gone to the trouble of writing it, so he takes this opportunity of offering it to IPKat readers, absolutely free. There's even a little competition, which goes as follows:

Question 1: who are Trademark World's lawyers?

Question 2: what are the legal grounds upon which Trademark World was advised not to run the feature?

Question 3: if you were a law firm that came up with a silly slogan, would you refuse t advertise in any magazine or journal that drew your silly slogan to the attention of its readers?

For your free copy of Trademark World click here
For your free copy of the banned article click here