There Can Be Only One... Lennon?

from the oh-please dept

ehrichweiss writes "Yoko Ono filed what is essentially a lawsuit with the Trademark and Trial Board of the US Patent & Trademark Office this week over a musician's ownership of the trademark of "Lennon", attempting to force the musician to give up her trademark. The musician, Lennon Murphy, has owned the trademark since 2003 and had sought permission from Arista records and Yoko to release under the name "Lennon" back in 2000. Yoko apparently waited until 2 days before the statute of limitations ran out to file the lawsuit."

The details on this are a bit murky, but the reality is that neither party looks good here. It seems rather silly that the musician tried to trademark "Lennon" in the first place. While it does seem odd that Yoko Ono waited until two days before the statute of limitations expired to file her complaints about the trademark, just the fact that people are arguing over whether or not a given name can be covered by trademark suggests how far lost our intellectual property laws have become. It's easy to make Yoko Ono look bad over this, but the fact that Murphy singer tried to trademark Lennon in the first place does seem problematic.

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