Wow! What a few days! On Friday I receive an email from the Intellectual Property Office about my recent trademark application notifying me of an 'intention of threatened opposition' from Monster Energy Company based in the United States! Now, I'm no technical bod but my limited understanding of trademarks is that you can't have jurisdiction on a word unless there is evidence that basically I'm working in the same market as them doing the same sort of stuff and maybe my logo is a rip off of their or my products could be mistaken for theirs.
Ok, for one, they are in the beverages market. I make children's bedding and nightwear and occasionally pyjamas bottoms for mummy's too. Call me stupid but in this situation, I can't really think that any of my products could ever be mistaken for their products. Ever. Like, not even in the slightest.
On another note, our logos are completely different. My logo (not my already tradmarked monster image) is totally aimed at children in a friendly way. Their logo is an 'M' slashed through like it was done by a monster. Again, you couldn't ever mistake one for the other.
It's going to be an interesting time nonetheless. I'm slap bang in the middle of a house move, it's end of term for my day job as a teacher and my hectic boys are running around 13 hours a day! On the plus side, I have been doing some research and found out that Rehab London also faced the same problems with Monster Energy Company and so I plan to have a chat with Lisa Hilton who, with Hackett and Tiger, successfully managed to run the #fightthemonster campaign to highlight the unnecessary bullying tactics that Monster Energy Company like to operate to and managed to get them to drop their lawsuit.
Fingers crossed for good news, but something tells me this is not going to be an easy ride!
