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Woman Trademarks Name and Threatens Sites Using It
An anonymous reader writes "Be careful mentioning Dr. Ann De Wees Allen. She's made it clear that she's trademarked her name and using it is 'illegal... without prior written permission.' She even lists out the names of offenders and shows you the cease-and-desist letter she sends them. And, especially don't copy any of the text on her website, because she's using a bit of javascript that will warn you 'Copyright Protect!' if you right click on a link."
It's a common misconception that a trademark registration gives you some sort of proprietary right over the mark. People think that it'll allow them to stop anyone from even mentioning the mark.
But the problem for them is that a trademark is not designed to give them property rights, but designed to prevent the public from being mislead about the origins of a product. In order to infringe a trademark, the public must have a likelihood of confusion as to which product they're buying or using. So, if a company infringes claims to be Dr. Ann De Wees Allen's company and starts selling a competing product, then she'd have a case against them. She has absolutely no case against someone just mentioning her name off-hand. My post mentioning "Dr. Ann De Wees Allen" does not create any confusion in the person reading my post that somehow my post is actually from "Dr. Ann De Wees Allen". She's got a worthless trademark.
The funny thing is that she's actually got a fairly well known IP firm to prosecute the trademark, so she must've spent at least several thousand dollars in getting this worthless trademark registration. I wonder if the firm warned her that the mark is useless and she persisted anyway, or if the firm omitted the worthless nature of the mark to her.
On a sidenote, for hilarity's sake, let's refer to her as "She Who Cannot Be Named."
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
My friend Sony Peterson told me this kind of thing is starting to gain traction.
"Dr. Ann De Wees Allen is a blathering idiot" would be more correct. She'll probably get her own talk show and then run for President in 2012.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
She has two patents that appear to show both what is wrong with America's diet mentality and the patent system all at once.
She's basically pimping out arginine as a panacea (from increased sexual performance to weight-loss). Just read about her wondrous achievements on Skinny Science Corporation: A Leading Biomedical Research Company. Never have I seen the word "science" so abused and raped by words around it. And it doesn't stop there. Google her name or "skinny science" and you're left with a plethora of bullshit sites with her vapid stare hawking complete medical farces designed to prey on the obese. Surprise surprise, she wants it to be illegal for you to talk about her and these sites.
Does anybody know how she got the prefix of "Dr."?
My work here is dung.
All kinds of people have tried this in the past, almost always in order to control negative information from being published about them. However, the courts have ALWAYS ruled that a person's name is fair use. She (just like the thousands before her), won't get anywhere with this. Even if a proper name was not fair use, having a trademark does not prevent people from talking about the trademark. At the most, it would prevent someone form using her trademark to infringe on her IP (e.g. counterfeiting). Basically, she's an idiot.
***I think it is bad, as a matter of public policy, to allow trademarks on names.***
Not really. Where the name is a genuine product like, say Jenny Craig, trademarking offers some protection against folks marketing their own "Jenny Craig" weight loss products unrelated to the original. I don't see a public policy problem with that.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I would be incredibly turned off if a girl started screaming "Oh, Anonymous Coward!" while we were going at it.
The parent post raises a good point but identifies the wrong problem.
Fair use is a defense to infringement, and the only uses I see on agesolutions.com appear to be truthful and factual, relating to Dr. Named's US Patent No. 6608109 expiring no later than 11/20/2011. Indeed, rather than considering this "an entirely valid use of trademark law," I'd see it as an egregious example of bad-faith, improper use of trademark law. Dr. Named's company doesn't appear to market the product with the mark as a brand as such- they seem to use ARGMATRIX- so there's little doubt they registered their mark to bully competitors.
The problem for agesolutions.com is that they infringe an entirely different mark: L-ARGININE M2. At least according to Dr. Named, "M2" has no significance in the industry or with respect to the product, and as such, it's protectable.