Dealt with the greek licensing nonsense back my in merch days.
It’s basically a patent troll, but for trademarks. They provide very little value and own the trademarks that essentially make the entire frat / sorority industry a thing. Beyond the trademark rent seeking they have three quarter million undergrads every year handing over thousands of their parents’ dollars to belong to the club, not including alumni who keep paying after they graduate.
It’s probably one of the worst entities for anyone to ever bother fighting in court so my guess is no one ever does.
You could, for a very small subset of things. You can't trademark the letter A and then sue anyone that uses it. But you can trademark in a particular industry (assuming it isn't common use there) the same way "word"is trademarked in software...
Frats and sororities seek out Affinity to license their trademarks, it's not like Affinity really owns the Greek alphabet or something nefarious like that. In this case, Spring just misinterpreted the whole thing with their automated system. In your case, were you actually selling merch with other organizations trademarks on them? That kind of seems silly to me that you expected to do that without giving the org any value/money back.
Yeah this is what I was thinking as well. Frats and sororities typically have three greek letters to make up their names. So Affinity might be able to trademark a specific combination of three greek letters, but there is no way that a single greek letter on it's own stands as a trademark violation.
> Frats and sororities typically have three greek letters to make up their names.
(1) Two is also typical.
(2) The name of the organization is two or three letters in much the same way that the name of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is just four letters.
> The Greek names are a convenience for talking to a broader lay audience.
For some reason, for this virus, we moved away from naming the variants after the city it was first detected in. Most people can picture Hong Kong or California better than the Greek alphabet.
> For some reason, for this virus, we moved away from naming the variants after the city it was first detected in.
Based on your link, it's very unusual to name them after cities.
Cities mentioned:
Brisbane
Perth
States / provinces / territories:
Hong Kong
Fujian
New Caledonia
Shanghai
California
New York
Jiangsu
Wisconsin
Hiroshima
Ohio
Florida
Yamagata
Massachusetts
Texas
Phuket
South Australia
Victoria
Countries:
Malaysia
Solomon Islands
Switzerland
How do you look at that list and think "it's usually the city"? It's the city in two out of four strains named for a location in Australia, and zero elsewhere.
(The names Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, Hiroshima, Yamagata and Phuket are ambiguous between a province and a city within that province. But the ambiguity is easily resolved by comparison to Fujian, Jiangsu, California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, and Texas.)
I should have said geography and not cities, but point being it’s easier to work with geography terms than Greek letters (in sequence!) at an international level.
Though you run the risk of people using different names in their language for the same place, and not even being consistent about when they substitute local terms.
> Though you run the risk of people using different names in their language for the same place, and not even being consistent about when they substitute local terms.
I'd be amused if the Chinese literature translated delta as 丁 (fourth in a sequence of 10).
In my college years, all the Greek chapter at my school contracted their merch out from unlicensed local vendors. The shadier, the better. Blatant trademark infringement of the House of Mouse® for sorority recruitment week? You'd best believe it.
It’s basically a patent troll, but for trademarks. They provide very little value and own the trademarks that essentially make the entire frat / sorority industry a thing. Beyond the trademark rent seeking they have three quarter million undergrads every year handing over thousands of their parents’ dollars to belong to the club, not including alumni who keep paying after they graduate.
It’s probably one of the worst entities for anyone to ever bother fighting in court so my guess is no one ever does.