Scary stuff !!
QAnon has an estimated 4.5 million followers worldwide. The race is on to trademark it to sell Q-branded hats, T-shirts, mugs and consulting services
Wired Report…
It was bound to happen. People across the world are trying to trademark QAnon, the American far-right conspiracy theory baselessly claiming that Donald Trump is saving the world from a group of elite satanist paedophiles.
According to data from the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a UN agency dealing with patents, copyrights, and trademark, seven applications to register “QAnon” or “Q Anon” as a trademark have been filed since the conspiracy theory debuted on 4Chan in October 2017. Of these, two have been successful – one in Australia and one in Germany – one has been dismissed, and the remaining four are pending. Most applications declare the intention to use the word – the pseudonym of the conspiracy theory’s initiator and now a byword for the whole delusion – as a brand for clothes, hats, coffee mugs, gadgets; some also aimed at registering the trademark to provide entertainment products and consultancy services.
As QAnon goes global, spreading to the UK, Germany, Italy, and gaining an estimated 4.5 million followers worldwide, it is easy to see why entrepreneurial individuals might want to appropriate the brand and monetise it.
But the United States, where QAnon was born and most of its followers are based, is also the country where trademarking it might prove toughest. “Every time there’s a cultural phenomenon, someone will try and register the associated phrase as a trademark,” says Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School. “In the US, it usually fails.”
That is because trademarks are supposed to work as indications of source: a swoosh on a pair of sneakers will tell you that those shoes were made by Nike rather than Reebok; an apple on a laptop will remind you that your computer was designed in Cupertino. In contrast, a QAnon logo on a T-shirt would not bring to mind any particular stylist. “The US Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO], which is the US entity that scrutinises these things, is likely to say: ‘This is just a name of a dispersed movement’,” Tushnet explains. “It doesn’t tell anything about the source of the product.”
Many bids to trademark political slogans such as Black Lives Matter failed for exactly that reason. And the same rationale appears to have doomed several attempts to trademark QAnon-adjacent formulas in the US. Jason Stringo, a Texas-based man who applied to trademark “Q Anon”, alongside related slogans “We Are the Storm” and “WWG1WGA”, ended up abandoning all three of his applications. In a letter refusing the registration of WWG1WGA, the USPTO wrote that the battle cry was so widespread that potential customers “would not perceive it as a mark that identifies the source of applicant’s goods but rather only as conveying an informational message”.
Read the full article at https://www.wired.co.uk/article/qanon-trademarks
