Feds Target "Mongols" Biker Club's Intellectual Property

couchslug writes in with a Reuters account of a Federal raid on a California-based motorcycle club, the Mongols, on charges "ranging from murder and robbery to extortion, money laundering, gun trafficking and drug dealing." The interesting twist is that the authorities are asking the courts to seize the IP of the biker club — specifically, their trademarked name "Mongols." "Federal agents and police in seven states arrested more than 60 members of the Mongols motorcycle gang on Tuesday in a sweep that also targeted for the first time an outlaw group's 'intellectual property,' prosecutors said. The arrests cap a three-year undercover investigation in which US agents posed as gang members and their girlfriends to infiltrate the group, even submitting to polygraph tests administered by the bikers ... [T]he name 'Mongols,' which appears on the gang's arm patch insignia, was trademarked by the group. The indictment seeks a court order outlawing further use of the name, which would allow any police officer 'who sees a Mongol wearing this patch ... to stop that gang member and literally take the jacket right off his back' ..."

Comments

easy fix

[heptapod]

Get tattoos of their logo/insignia. Get it someplace prominent and call out the cops to try and take it from them. I doubt law enforcement is going to start a collection of biker lampshades.

Re:Bullshit

[grahamd0]

Not that it's going to amount to anything - they will still use their name, and they'll likely call themselves "The Original Mongols..." or some such nonesense...

I doubt they'd even go that far to bow the will the courts. They'll probably just keep calling themselves the plain old Mongols, and if someone disagrees or misappropriates the name, they'll probably call themselves the guys who stabbed him to death.

What would really ruin them is for someone to use their logo and release a Mongols brand sugary breakfast cereal with pink, marshmallow motorcycles.

Re:Not how trademarks work

[Martin Blank]

I suspect that the first thing the DOJ would do, then, is to get a court order against all members of the Mongols pertaining to the use of the logo. Once the court order is there, they'd have potential reason to move on those seen wearing it.

Of course, this does nothing to stop the Mongols from simply using another insignia, one that does not directly reference the Mongol name. It would spread throughout the organization in weeks, if not days, and the whole exercise would lose its value.