Trademarks are words, services, symbols or designs created to identify goods or services from one party to another.\u00a0 They also seek to maintain the reputational value of a brand while helping to defend itself from counterfeiters or fraudsters. But thanks to the current \u2018meme\u2019 culture that has proliferated across the Internet, we are seeing a rise in opportunistic trademarking of the latest trending words or phrases.<\/p>\n
Case in point: On May 28, 2016, a gorilla named Harambe was shot and killed at Cincinnati Zoo<\/a> after it grabbed a three-year-old boy who had fallen into its enclosure. The story was picked up by news organisations all over the world, and the decision to kill Harambe quickly became a topic of fierce debate and controversy. It quickly snowballed out of control<\/a>, with the gorilla\u2019s name going viral across the Internet and provoking an influx of over-the-top tributes to Harambe.<\/p>\n The opportunity to try and capitalise upon this story did not go unnoticed by some. Just over a month after the story broke, an entrepreneur from Ohio filed an application to trademark the name Harambe in the hope of using the name on a range of merchandise, including t-shirts, hats and more.<\/p>\n A similar scenario took place earlier this year, when US President Donald Trump posted a late-night tweet with a typo that read \u2018covfefe\u2019<\/a>. The word instantly became a huge meme, with people trying to decipher what it meant and interpreting it in their own ways. By lunchtime the next day, a trademark application for the phrase \u2018Covfefe Coffee\u2019 had already been filed, and two weeks later there had been 32 different applications including the word.<\/p>\n We can never be 100% certain of the intentions of parties filing applications as part of stories such as these \u2014 some might genuinely be looking to use the name for merchandising purposes, while others might perhaps look to simply \u2018sit\u2019 on the trademark \u2014 but one thing is clear: almost all attempts to register trending phrases and words such as these with the USPTO can be doomed to fail.<\/p>\n