The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

A joke that starts off “a duck walks into a bar,” has good odds of being funny. Ducks are funny. A joke beginning “a water buffalo walks into a bar” just doesn’t have the same ring. But “a can of Spam walks into a bar”—now that’s hilarious. Spam’s one of the funniest things about Minnesota, next to ice fishing and the Third Avenue Bridge. So when a company that makes spam-blocking software tries to trademark the name “Spam Arrest,” and Hormel takes legal action, it’s funny. It’s funny on a gut level, in a way that it wouldn’t be if, say, unsolicited email had developed a nickname like “Chicken-in-a-Biscuit” or “Coke.” But is the case, now working its way through the legal system, actually something to laugh about? Or is Hormel just responsibly protecting its business interests?

Preserving the trademark of a popular product takes hard work and dedication. If you don’t actively go after those who misuse your trademark, a court could declare it a generic term, and thus no longer eligible for a trademark. “Yo-yo” used to be a type of “return top,” but since the company that invented it unwisely marketed their product as “a yo-yo,” and not “a Yo-Yo® brand Return Top,” the word fell into common use and the company lost the trademark—and the name recognition that came with it.

The brilliant Minnesota folks who invented in-line roller skates got it right. Rollerblade® has been successful in preserving its trademark. Style books for major newspapers and magazines now spell out that writers should use “in-line skating” in place of “rollerblading,” because a trademark cannot be a verb. Type “rollerblading” in a word-processing program with automatic spell-check, and you’ll get that jeering red underline that indicates the word isn’t supposed to exist. This is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars Rollerblade spent on advertising to teach writers the correct way to use its trademark. Company spokesman Nick Skally expressed sympathy for Hormel’s predicament. “Can you imagine? I would not like to be in their shoes.”

But is Spam really in the same situation as Rollerblade? Competitors in the meat industry are not claiming “Spam” has become a generic term; Armour, for example, calls its comparable offering “Potted Meat Food Product.” The chances of Hormel’s canned meat becoming confused with another are not high.

A more salient and worrisome question might be this: Who in the wide networked world doesn’t call unwanted email “spam”? “Spam” translates to “spam” in German, French, and Norwegian. And in August of 1998, the word entered the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time, with the definition “irrelevant Internet messages sent to a large number of people.” Officially, Hormel says it does not object to use of “this slang term to describe unsolicited commercial email”—as long as it doesn’t appear in all caps like “Spam” does on its can.

Does the dictionary status of “spam” lessen Hormel’s chances of blocking a trademark using the word for an unrelated product? In a personal, noncommercial, and solicited email to The Rake, Hormel representative Julie Craven responded by cleverly avoiding this and all other questions posed to her, instead stating, “We object to someone else trying to commercially exploit a brand we created and made famous.”

New York patent lawyer Michael Brown remains skeptical of Hormel’s case. “I don’t see how Spam Arrest harms Hormel at all. I don’t think anyone receiving unsolicited email is going to immediately have a revulsion against luncheon meat. I mean, that they didn’t have before.”—Katherine Glover