Disney Withdraws Trademark App On Seal Team 6

from the seal-team-7? dept

Disney’s attempt to trademark “Seal Team 6,” two days after SEAL Team 6 got bin Laden, made the national news as an example of trademark law gone insane. It took a of couple weeks, but Disney came to its senses, realized that it was only going to dig itself in a deeper and deeper hole pursuing this, and has now withdrawn the application. Maybe next time, Disney lawyers will think twice before trying to trademark something so well known.

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Companies: disney

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Comments on “Disney Withdraws Trademark App On Seal Team 6”

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23 Comments
Mike Masnick (profile) says:

Re: Re:

What Disney was attempting to do reflects not a whit on trademark law. It reflects only on Disney.

I disagree. If Disney didn’t think it could do this, it wouldn’t have. It reflects poorly on trademark law.

Separately, I find it odd that you always seem to state that any particular awful action is merely an indication of those doing it, and simply refuse to connect the dots. When we point to these sorts of things happening all the time, it seems pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the problem is the system, not those using it.

FuzzyDuck says:

Re: Re: Re:

The problem is indeed the system, in a grab what you can system of monopoly rights distributions, you have to grab what you can before others do or you’ll loose out to the “competition”. In fact you could state that it’s a company’s duty to its shareholders to participate in this grab fest.

The system is rotten, and makes these companies behave in rotten ways. Of course these same companies lobbied to make the system rotten in the first place. So we can still blame them.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

We will have to agree to disagree.

Frankly, I had expected you to comment on what the USN is/was attempting to do. The USG, and particularly the military, does not have any competitors in the classic sense of the word, except, perhaps, internal competition such as aviation within each of the services. The same is true of virtually every other function within the federal government. If the USN response is proper under law, then why not have other federal groups/agencies/etc. trademark their logos, slogans, and other source identifying indicia?

anymouse (profile) says:

Sounds like a Government Make Work program...

So now every Government Agency is supposed to waste time, effort, and money to ‘trademark’, ‘copyright’ and ‘patent’ their agencies name to protect it?

I can see the reasoning, this will provide much work for all those bored government employees when they aren’t too busy spying on models or listening in on private conversations.

It would only take one employee a couple hours to propose an update that said…. “Government Agencies, Names, Acronyms, Internal Designations, and any related nomenclature are not subject to Trademark, Copyright, or Patenting”.

Many hours of useless work for many government workers compared to a few hours for one worker….. You know which one they are going to go with

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