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Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

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Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#131

Post by Symmetry »

mint2 wrote: post #124

Basically this just goes to show the way trademarks work is broken. One shouldn’t be able to trademark single words, or at the very least common ones.

Just because a word is trademarked doesn't mean that someone else can't use, or even trademark, the same word in a different line of business. I can't call my new OS "Windows". I probably won't be able to start a line of computer monitors called "Windows" either. But if I wanted to open a line of restaurants under the "Windows" brand I'd probably be fine. Trademarks are only enforceable when there's a danger of consumer confusion.

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#132

Post by JCharante »

KSteffensen wrote: post #98
boston_clone wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the rub, though - we know that vegetarian (including vegan) diets are nutritionally complete and applicable at virtually all stages of life [0], yet people make choices that result in hundreds of billions of animals being slaughtered each year. The cognitive dissonance that accompanies eating meat is extraordinarily pervasive [1]. 0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps…

Why is there an ethical problem in slaughtering an animal for meat if that animal has been raised in good conditions and the actual killing happens with a minimum of pain and fear for the animal? I get why foie gras is problematic, but I don't see the problem in a leg of lamb.

Have you seen the movie "The Island"? A organ supplier fakes a post apocalypse for the humans living in the bunkers. They still live a nice life and when they need organs they hold a lottery to see who gets to go to the surface where they've built a resort on an island as they supposedly repopulate.

These humans live fairly happy lives and were bred (cloned) to be harvested for the organs. Would you oppose the real world implementation of this system? The people could even not find out what happens to them, they could be gassed during the transit.

It really stems down to whether you think it's okay to kill living beings. I don't care too much for life forms smaller than 1cm and that's one of my biases, but I don't think it's okay to kill living beings larger than 1cm.

You could say that we are humans and those are non-human animals, therefore it's okay. I'm not a fan of this line of thinking because that is how caste systems work in societies that exploit different groups of people. They're of a lower caste so it's okay to treat them like dirt. They're of a different skin color so it's okay to treat them bad. It's okay to kill them.

If we discovered aliens, what would have to be different about them to make it not okay to raise them to be killed for our tastebud enjoyment? The ability to do calculus? Plenty of people can't do calculus. The ability to speak? We're still trying to learn how certain whales communicate or how crows seem to have a memory for previous bad actors /abusers in studies. We don't eat handicapped people nor people with severe mental problems. If it's not okay to farm humans, what about our predecessors? We have a common ancestor with other life forms on earth, so where do we draw the line? Bipedalism?

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#133

Post by Symmetry »

maneesh wrote: post #68
tslater2006 wrote: post #56

Case number for locating it in PACER: 5:2021cv02419 At a glance of the complaint it seems that Impossible X started this with complaints and legal action against mpossible Foods for infringing on their trademarks. The complaint additionally shows that Impossible X was granted their registration of IMPOSSIBLE on Jan 9th, 2018.

Here's a list of Impossible trademarks: https://impossiblex.com/trademarks/ Note the logo: Class 041 | 025 | 12/18/2012 https://trademark.trademarkia.com/impossible-85578345.html The registration date was in 2012, and, apart from the blank line in the middle, is identical to impossible food's logo. Both use League Gothic Font.

That's for a trademark in the context of "exercise and fitness" though. You can have one Impossible doing that and another Impossible selling food and there's no consumer confusion so they're both fine. It's just when the fitness company started applying their existing branding to nutrition products in apparently 2018 that suddenly there was a conflict.

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#134

Post by JCharante »

jrm4 wrote: post #40
kaycebasques wrote: post #16

As a vegan myself this is very unfortunate because we are already easy targets and subject to a lot of prejudice. Impossible Meat bullying a small company might unleash a backlash of anti-vegan sentiment that can take on a life of its own. Make no mistake it has been there all along. Go back to other discussions about veganism here on HN and you will see the common anti-vegan memes. But when you're one of the leading…

Black person here. I don't think (though I'm not going to say I'm 100% certain) that the word "prejudice" is best here? You (very probably) made a choice to be a certain way, here. So, the "judice" part is correct, and people should perhaps be nicer, but this doesn't feel like the right word.

Isn't religion a choice? I know plenty of people who have converted and they weren't forced to convert. You can be prejudiced against someone else of a differnet religion.

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#135

Post by KSteffensen »

delecti wrote: post #128
KSteffensen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia article describes the various psychological mechanisms people use to avoid thinking about the fact that something they are doing involves something else getting killed. It does not provide arguments for why killing an animal for it's meat (or hide or other resource) is wrong. A counterpoint to your 'raising humans for consumption' point which is equally extreme but in the opposite direction. How do you…

Even if plants feel suffering, fewer plants die from eating them directly than would if we had to pass their calories through an intermediary animal. It's closer to equivalent for chickens, but it's about an order of magnitude for cows.

If you grant that eating a plant causes suffering to that plant I don't see why the order of magnitude of the suffering or number of entities made to suffer matters.

Is it acceptable to inflict suffering on other beings to alleviate your own suffering or hunger?

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#136

Post by jeremyjh »

ramblinrose wrote: post #80
zwieback wrote: post #55

Reading this: http://casefilingsalert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Impos... it seems like Impossible X complained first and Impossible food is saying that they want it declared that they are not infringing on Impossible X's trademarks. IOW: little guy complained first and big guy is asking for relief that they are not doing anything wrong. Is there more to the story?

Thanks for sharing this. It looks like Impossible X (the defendant) was the first to sue to have Impossible Foods cease using their logo and trademark. And now Impossible Foods isn't budging and asserting their weight through counter-suit. It still feels very unfair even though the small guy started it; he's trying to protect his brand. He has supplied actual cases of confusion between the two companies according to…

Its lying, is what it is.

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#137

Post by jeremyjh »

jawns wrote: post #100
ramblinrose wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this. It looks like Impossible X (the defendant) was the first to sue to have Impossible Foods cease using their logo and trademark. And now Impossible Foods isn't budging and asserting their weight through counter-suit. It still feels very unfair even though the small guy started it; he's trying to protect his brand. He has supplied actual cases of confusion between the two companies according to…

And isn't the company that holds the trademark legally obligated to defend it? My understanding is that if you aren't actively making sure that your trademark is not infringed upon, it bolsters the case that the trademark has been abandoned. So it's not like the trademark holder is looking for a fight. The law essentially forces their hand.

And yet that is not the story we were told in the SP. We were told a lie.

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#138

Post by dragonwriter »

dhosek wrote: post #93
nefitty wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a litigation betting market. I know there's prediction markets, but I'm wondering about a community dedicated to market making on any/all lawsuits.

I can see that becoming a serious moral hazard. If a judge or juror can make money on a lawsuit that they're deciding reaching a particular verdict, then there's a very real danger that they will do so. I'm pretty sure that in the grand scheme of things we want less opportunity for this sort of corruption of the judicial process, not more.

> If a judge or juror can make money on a lawsuit that they're deciding reaching a particular verdict, then there's a very real danger that they will do so.

If a witness or person in custody of physical evidence can do so, you have a similar problem.

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#139

Post by will4274 »

delecti wrote: post #125
will4274 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In short, I think killing another living being that experiences suffering is wrong. It fails Kant's categorical imperative. Animals aren't going to believe that eating meat is wrong - and if we tried to prevent animals from eating meat, we'd kill a lot of them - not to mention it'd just be ridiculous. There's simply no way to include animals in universal law and maintain reciprocity. It's an internally inconsistent…

I don't agree that morals need to be reciprocated to be valid. It's not internally inconsistent to say I think it's immoral to kill things beings even if they wouldn't grant me or others the same.

Libertarians don't agree that the inability to protect the environment makes their philosophy invalid either. The fact is though, most people look for reciprocatity in their moral philosophy.

It's not that every individual has to agree not to kill you. It's that we have to agree that punishment is appropriate for killers. Getting specific - it's incoherent to say it's immoral for humans to kill rabbits but moral for foxes to kill rabbits. To have a consistent moral philosophy, you have to either punish the foxes and try to prevent them from killing the rabbits, or you have to admit that killing rabbits isn't _really_ a problem.

Re: Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

#140

Post by kstenerud »

OK, I see what's going on here.

Impossible Foods primary arguments are:

- They use the mark IMPOSSIBLE with services relating to recipes, food ingredients, and cooking information, and Impossible X does not.

- Impossible X has challenged their right to use the trademark in that manner, and so they want the courts to decide with finality who has what rights.

- Since Impossible X has not asserted their rights to the mark in this manner in many years, and have not pursued any business in that area, Impossible Foods wants any trade marks in relation to food to be considered abandoned (incidentally, this is why big companies pursue trademark claims so aggressively).

- They also want to be awarded costs (not a likely outcome, but always good to throw in).

My dry reading of this gives the impression that they're likely to prevail. If you don't protect your trademark, especially against such a high profile company and let it run for years unchallenged, you risk losing it. This is to prevent people from submarining a lawsuit by allowing a company to build massive value in a mark you own rights to, only to snatch it away from them and hold it for ransom.

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