US Court To Gruyere Cheese People: No, You Can't Ban People From Calling Their Cheese Gruyere If They Aren't Your Neighbors

US Court To Gruyere Cheese People: No, You Can't Ban People From Calling Their Cheese Gruyere If They Aren't Your Neighbors

2 years ago
Anonymous $dEyjbtEkMr

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220112/09320548269/us-court-to-gruyere-cheese-people-no-you-cant-ban-people-calling-their-cheese-gruyere-if-they-arent-your-neighbors.shtml

One of the more annoying trends in intellectual property is when regional consortiums try to lock up terms or language around a specific style of product with arguments that only that region can produce a certain thing. If you're familiar with this concept, the first thing to leap to your mind will likely be one French wine group's control over the term "champagne" in certain regions. Another example would be a consortium of Belgian chocolate makers trying to assert that nobody can advertise "Belgian-style chocolate" unless it comes from one of them. It's all very silly, as it attempts to take a term that everyone recognizes as describing the style of a product and transform it into locked up language to be controlled by some specific originators. Like I said, silly, though, far too often, these consortiums get their way.

Not the case in the United States for a group of French and Swiss cheese-makers in the area surrounding Gruyeres, who attempted to get the term "gruyere" trademarked. After the the U.S. Dairy Export Council opposed the mark, and the USPTO somehow got this right for once and rejected the application over the term being generic, the Interprofession Du Gruyere and Syndicat Interprofessionel du Gruyere took the matter to the Eastern District of Virginia courts only to find the judge there has ruled against it too.