Trademarks Take On New Importance

Excerpt from an article in The New York Times
Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Trademarks Take On New Importance in Internet Era 

By STEPHANIE STROM

PRINCETON, N.J. — As a serial snack-food entrepreneur, Warren Wilson is no stranger to the challenges of running a business.

In the early days of his first enterprise, selling funnel cakes at fairs, there was the time when, tired of losing money on inclement days, he bought weather insurance — and proceeded to lose even more money than he had when it rained. In the 1990s, he and his wife and business partner, Sara, once had to mortgage their house and sell off investments to make their company’s payroll.

But it still came as a bit of a shock when the Wilsons made what they thought was a routine move to register the trademark of their hot product — a flat pretzel snack called Pretzel Crisps — and it was contested by none other than Frito-Lay, the 800-pound gorilla of the snack food market owned by PepsiCo.

“This is so different from anything else we’ve faced because we’re not fighting a product in the supermarket, we’re not fighting against an institution like a bank, we’re not dealing with an act of nature,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview at his company’s headquarters here. “This fight is about a big company that wants to dominate the snack food category by crushing a little company like ours rather than by competing with us.”

Frito-Lay, whose Rold Gold pretzel products and Stacy’s Pita Chips compete with Pretzel Crisps, declined to discuss the case, citing the pending dispute with the Wilsons’ company, Princeton Vanguard.

But in its filings with the Patent and Trademark Office, Frito-Lay contends that Pretzel Crisps cannot be registered as a trademark because it is a generic term. “Like ‘milk chocolate bar,’ the combination of ‘pretzel’ and ‘crisp’ gains no meaning as a phrase over and above the generic meaning of its constituent terms,” the company wrote in a 2010 motion.

The dispute is still pending with the trademark office’s trial board.