Standard & Poor Trying To Shut Down Single Mother's Coffee Shop

[matcom]

<snip>

What a difference a "u" makes.

Standard & Poor's, the multibillion-dollar publisher of financial information, this month filed a federal lawsuit against Standard & Pours Coffee & Stocks, a 3-year-old coffee shop and live music venue in South Dallas, Texas.

In it, the McGraw-Hill subsidiary demands that Pascale Hall, Standard & Pours' owner, pay S&P three times the revenue its company lost due to confusion over the names and three times her company's profits -- all because her shop's similar name has damaged S&P's "impeccable" reputation for "accuracy, reliability and integrity."

"I think they're going way overboard," Hall said. "It's just a play on words ... but they are scaring me, because my business is totally on the line, and it's everything I own, and I'm a single mother with two children."

She said that she had sent some coffee to the company's Manhattan headquarters this week as a goodwill gesture and that employees from the Standard & Poor's Dallas office who frequent Standard & Pours "all think it's crazy."

But Standard & Poor's said it must protect vigorously the brand it has worked to create and that it had offered Hall "reasonable compensation" to change her name.

"We appreciate Ms. Hall's predicament, but we must make every effort to ensure that our valuable brand is not diluted or misused," the company said in a statement. A spokesman declined to elaborate on the release, which repeated the claim that Hall has profited from the Standard & Poor's name.

Chris Harris, an attorney who offered to defend Hall for free, said most of the lawsuit's claims are baseless, the equivalent of "killing an ant with a flamethrower."

"It's a theme, is what it is, not a marketing gimmick to get investors in there," he said. "Nobody's walked into Standard & Poor's' office in Manhattan and asked for an espresso, and nobody's walked into Pascale's and asked for financial advice."

Experts say the law does provide some consideration for individuals and free speech rights to counterbalance trademark rights like those described in the S&P complaint.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/08/24/BUGRLKO2B81.DTL&type=printable

[Bunny]

1. Killing an ant with a flamethrower sounds about right.

I can respect the company's need to maintain the "purity" of their name, but to demand three times the amount of business they lost due to confusion? That's just absurd.

Here's a story about an ice-cream stand, near where I grew up, that seems equally absurd:

http://www.courttv.com/people/2004/1101/kreme_ap.html

BELSANO, Pa. (AP) — Forget "Kramer vs. Kramer." A legal fight brewing between doughnut maker Krispy Kreme and a seasonal ice cream stand could be called "Kreme vs. Kream."

Jack and Christine Hoover have run the Krispy Kream stand in Cambria County's Blacklick Township since 1968, keeping the name that had been in use since the stand opened in 1961.

Recently, the Hoovers received a letter from Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc. complaining of trademark infringement and indicating that more "formal steps" would be taken if they don't stop using their name. The Winston-Salem, N.C., based Krispy Kreme registered its name in 1951.

The Hoovers have hired a lawyer hoping to lick the doughnut company, but they worry that Krispy Kreme's dough may prevail.

"We're well known for our ice cream, and we have a large sign in the front picturing a boy holding an ice cream cone, not a doughnut," Jack Hoover said. Krispy Kream doesn't sell doughnuts.

The Hoovers say customers might think the ownership of the stand has changed if they have to change the name.

Krispy Kreme, however, said that's not the company's problem.

"Unfortunately, this business is using a fully protected trademark, and we have to protect it," spokeswoman Amy Hughes said. "It can create confusion."


:eyes: I'm often confused by donuts and ice cream.

[Divameow77]

5. Maybe Krispy Kreme should have

requested a name change back in 1968, not 38 years later.

[Squeech]

2. Intellectual property law sucks

There was a case back in the 20th century involving a band called the Toucans. They played calypso and similar Caribbean musics, and they had two members that played steel drums, which are known in that community as "cans," and their name was a pun. They got to the point where they were recording, and they figured they'd better trademark their name. The Kellogg's company challenged their right to use "Toucans" as a trademark, on the grounds that they owned the rights to the toucan as a trademark for one of their breakfast cereals (Froot Loops?). The band pointed out how great a difference there was between music and breakfast, and that nobody looking for the latter was likely to be confused by the former, but Kellogg's claimed that they had once put one of those flimsy sound page things on their cereal packages and might want to do so again and therefore had to defend their trademark even against music. Basically they overwhelmed this poor band by throwing excess corporate lawyers at them. I was furious, and I stopped buying their products for years, and tried to get Mrs. Squeech to stop eating Pop Tarts too.

When they make me dictator of the world I'm gonna thoroughly revise intellectual property law. I'll start by repealing the Sonny Bono Gift to Disney Copyright Extension Act, then I'm gonna expand the definition of Fair Use, and ultimately I'll make all of Standard and Poor's attorneys work for that coffee shop for minimum wage.

[Pierre.Suave]

3. LOL

When I am dictator, before I worry about that stuff, I will have all the bUSH cronies in jail.

[Elidor]

4. Hell ya! Squeech for dictator!

We'd be off to a helluva start with changes like those.

[Squeech]

6. My campaign platform

I sorta want to run for Congress on the premise that I won't vote for any new laws, but instead will agitate to repeal a bunch of the old ones that I contend are causing the problems.

The idea is that we have a good common sense (or common law) understanding of what we really need in our legal code, and that doesn't need a lot of maintenance. But there are pressures on legislators to pass new laws, from the fluffing and funding from lobbyists to the misplaced sense of legacy (and don't forget that one of the charges against Kerry was that he didn't get enough bills passed in his tenure as senator). So bills do get filed, and then the culture of corruption gets its hooks into them to draft special privileges for powerful backers, and they end up screwing things up worse than they were before. I want to clear all that special interest horse pucky out of our legal code.

And I definitely have a strong aversion to the PATRIOT Act.

This may not be a winning strategy, however, since Mrs. Squeech once said she wouldn't vote for it.

[Gormy Cuss]

7. Reminds me of a story in Maine concerning Gimbel's

The lawyers from the now defunct NY-based department store sued Gimbel's country store in Boothbay and lost, based on two facts: 1)only and idiot would confuse the two and 2)the country store had used the named for decades. The department store chain closed in the 1980s; the country store has since acquired the trademark.