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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought I read somewhere that they were suing charities (?), which if true leaves me feeling it’s not so much of a bad thing that he’s doing.
It's a brand that built its success on nazi collaborationism, its extremely hard to feel sorry about any struggle it might have.
1. It's a trademark issue, not copyright. 2. Don't companies have an obligation to defend their trademark or risk not being able to defend them in the future?
but i have read and learned crazy things like you can't have part of their name in your own products or company names. or again, you can't use their main colors for branding.
ridiculous!
1. It's a trademark issue, not copyright. 2. Don't companies have an obligation to defend their trademark or risk not being able to defend them in the future?
He has a show about consumer rights ("Joe Lycett's Got Your Back", which I suppose will be "Hugo Boss's Got Your Back" next season) so it's in his wheelhouse.
On a tangent here, a bit over 20 years ago I used to work for a guy who registered "boss.com.xx" (where xx is a country TLD I won't detail) because that was the name of his publishing company here. This was still dialup/ISDN days for most small companies over here. He held on to it for a long time, but I noticed in the last couple of years that it now redirects to www.hugoboss.com. Knowing this particular person I am…
Perhaps there's opportunity to bag the few others and drop them an offer. =)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a brand that built its success on nazi collaborationism, its extremely hard to feel sorry about any struggle it might have.
This is quite a gross generalization. Do you often get judged for the sins of your predecessors? And if you buy anything from Ford, Mercedes, Porsche, Siemens, IBM, Kodak, Volkswagen, Bayer, Allianz, Coca Cola (yes, that Coca Cola), Chase, Standard Oil (Exxon, BP, Chevron) and many, many others what does that say about your principles?
On a tangent here, a bit over 20 years ago I used to work for a guy who registered "boss.com.xx" (where xx is a country TLD I won't detail) because that was the name of his publishing company here. This was still dialup/ISDN days for most small companies over here. He held on to it for a long time, but I noticed in the last couple of years that it now redirects to www.hugoboss.com. Knowing this particular person I am…
I would like to bring everyone's attention on his top notch new signature
The shirts weren’t trying to knock off or reference Kentucky Athletics in any way, but that didn’t stop UK from putting legal resources behind their effort. Yet another example of how the legal system is built for the rich.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/us/-legal-moonshiner-and-...
1. It's a trademark issue, not copyright. 2. Don't companies have an obligation to defend their trademark or risk not being able to defend them in the future?
His accusation is that Hugo Boss are going well beyond reasonable defense of their trademark, by suing businesses in entirely unrelated industries that use either 'Hugo' or 'Boss' in their names or their product names. One example he cited was Boss Brewing, a Welsh brewery who said they spent about £30,000 / 38,200 USD on legal costs and rebranding after being targeted by Hugo Boss. They're also alleged to have sent…
The problem is that this question ultimately hinges on a court's judgment, and they can't know in advance what evidence of "reasonable defense of their trademark" will satisfy all the judges in all the cases where this issue is examined.
So from the trademark-holder's point of view, the approach has to be to do everything they can to be seen by the courts to be doing anything necessary to defend their brand; particularly for such a big/valuable brand like Hugo Boss, it's too risky to do anything less.
When you talk to people in these kinds of companies privately, they don't personally care at all if some largely-unrelated small business somewhere has a name that is vaguely reminiscent of theirs, and they'd rather not have to waste time and money taking action against them.
These indignant reactions always happen when a big corporate is seen to be bullying small, defenceless companies over trademarks, but on this topic it's a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game".
On a tangent here, a bit over 20 years ago I used to work for a guy who registered "boss.com.xx" (where xx is a country TLD I won't detail) because that was the name of his publishing company here. This was still dialup/ISDN days for most small companies over here. He held on to it for a long time, but I noticed in the last couple of years that it now redirects to www.hugoboss.com. Knowing this particular person I am…
I'm not sure the list of countries that use com.xx is particularly long. And the the list of those with that redirect is even shorter (one?!) Perhaps there's opportunity to bag the few others and drop them an offer. =)
