Taylor Swift Using Dubious Trademark Registrations To Shut Down Sales Of Fan-Made Goods
from the consolidating-power dept
Oh, to be a lawyer retained by Taylor Swift™ — free of concerns about your client’s financial health or the nuances of intellectual property law. When not pursuing bogus defamation claims or targeting clear fair use cases, you can always bring the power of Swift® to bear on the unofficial adoration of the probably-not-a-white-supremacist singer’s fanbase.
Legal threat after legal threat sent following trademark filing after trademark filing in hopes of capturing 100% of all available SwiftDollars™. Why only collect royalties when you can submit individual lyrics from songs to the US Patent and Trademark Office to lock everyone else out of the Swift Merch Machine®?
Ron Coleman — who knows a thing or two about viable trademark registrations — cuts to the heart of Swift’s now-trademark trademark bullying. Quoting a more respectful article by Billboard, Coleman sets the stage:
Earlier this month, Swift moved to trademark key phrases from her music: the title of her upcoming album Reputation, her latest single “Look What You Made Me Do” and one of the lines from said single, “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now.” Swift plans to use the phrases on a variety of licensed merchandise, from t-shirts to notebooks and guitar picks. “Look What You Made Me Do” is already emblazoned across t-shirts on Swift’s online merch store, which has likely generated significant sales in conjunction with the singer’s controversial Ticketmaster Verified Fan campaign that rewards merch and music buyers with a better shot at good tickets.
[…]
Etsy shop owners who pedal [sic] unofficial, Swift-inspired goods have been seeing a spike in cease and desist letters, according to BuzzFeed.
The latest trademark filings follow registrations for such lyrical inanities as “party like it’s 1989” and “this sick beat” — the latter of which could have been “coined” by anyone countless times before Swift™ decided she should be the sole proprietor.
Ultimately… it’s trademark bullying — the continuation of IP law by other means — from which the recipients of these baseless legal threats have no realistic recourse.
Is it utterly insane to suggest that if a celebrity (whether an athlete, “artist” or whatever they’re famous for these days) coins or brings fame to a phrase, other people should not be able to profit from it without the celebrity getting some of the vigorish?
Yes, it’s utterly insane. I won’t give Congress credit for thinking this through, but the way it turns out neither the trademark regime nor the copyright regime protect clever wordplay, and they’re not meant to. Why? Because not everything should be monetized.
Especially when it already is. Every time one of these fans sells something with a Taylor Swift “lyric” (and, really — puh-lease) on it, each use of that something is an advertisement for Taylor Swift.
There’s your monetization, Taylor. Hope that helps you make the rent this month.
As Coleman points out, attempting to trademark lyrical phrases isn’t unheard of, but it’s also rarely guaranteed to result in a legitimate trademark. Swift maybe doesn’t know this, but her lawyers do… or at least should. What her lawyers do know is someone side-gigging on Etsy isn’t going to push back much when a threat letter claiming nothing more than a pending trademark registration shows up in their mailbox signed by a lawyer with a string of Roman numerals after his name on the letterhead of a high-powered law firm.
So, the abuse will continue and Swift™ will continue to lock fans out of being fans on their own terms. They’re always welcome to add themselves to the Taylor Swift Official Revenue Stream®, which will allow Swift, Inc. to dictate the terms of the relationship as well as the markup on goods and services.
And so homage is forbidden; unofficial inspiration is punished; the brand is “managed”; the fan base is still, in the main, slavishly dedicated to buying Officially Licensed Garbage; the legal fees are earned; the world spins on with a bunch fewer Etsy shmattes devoted to the star’s fabulous self; and all is well with the world.
That’s not to say Swift has cornered the market on ridiculous IP litigation. Swift is also being sued for infringement for allegedly jacking one of the most unimaginative lyrical lines ever written.
The songwriters behind 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play” say Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” infringes on their lyrics. The aughts girl group sang “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate” more than a decade before Swift declared “[T]he players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
Sean Hall and Nathan Butler co-authored the 2001 song and claim they popularized the now ubiquitous phrase.
Considering the tautological nature of the disputed phrase, it’s unlikely Hall/Butler were the first to use this phrase, much less the only ones to ever think of describing the actions of players/haters as being, respectively, playing/hating. But lawyers gonna law, as they say [trademark registration pending]. And here we are, watching two artists dispute the origin of two banal takes on players/haters. Given the stupidity on display, we should be more than willing to hate both the players and the game.
Filed Under: fans, taylor swift, trademark
Comments on “Taylor Swift Using Dubious Trademark Registrations To Shut Down Sales Of Fan-Made Goods”
Swift is on the verge of alienating her fan base. Of course, 10 y/o girls do buy a lot of merchandice and a new crop pop up every year.
Re: Re:
According to both the RIAA and MPAA, suing your fans is the most highly recommended way to get even more fans.
Seems weird for this article to include that popfront article. That thing further references some other articles, but reading through them, it’s all based on some vague interpretations of imagery and lyrics, and the fact that she didn’t explicitly support Hillary until very late in the campaign and hasn’t explicitly discounted all this speculation.
Assuming for a moment that she’s not a secret nazi, I imagine all that speculation sounds absurd and not even worth her time refuting.
In any case this really seems like jumping the gun on calling racism and the sort of thing that really fuels the backlash.
Re: Re:
“Assuming for a moment that she’s not a secret nazi, I imagine all that speculation sounds absurd and not even worth her time refuting.”
This smacks of nothing more than “if you don’t parrot my ideals then you obviously support those other really bad guys ideals”
I am no Taylor Swift fan but how about we stop pushing celebrities to adopt all of our “platforms or else”? Some people just want to stay away from these bullshit combat politics.
Re: Re:
“Seems weird for this article to include that popfront article.”
Yeah, Tim, what the hell? Do you really have to link to trash like that? This is TechDirt, so I’m a little worried. What’s your next move, you gonna turn on gamers for being “misogynists” and “Nazis” with the kind of bullshit we’d expect from NBC?
If I see more crap like this, I’m just not going to read your articles anymore. I like this site, but I’m really losing interest in you personally as a writer. Please stick to facts and stop being such an ideologue. Thank you.
After reading the article it looks like Techdirt is feeling left out because they haven’t received a bogus C&D from Swift yet.
But hey you have to set the line and wait for a bite.
;P
Re: Re:
Should have put one of the trademarks in the headline:
I like the last one best because it has a chance of attracting lawsuits from both Swift and 3LW.
Taylor fans:
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
There are more than a few recording artists whose fans follow them in large part because of their consistant stance on certain ethical principles. Like the Grateful Dead not only allowing, but actually encouraging fans to record concerts, while many other performers shamelessly have them arrested and prosecuted.
However, it’s probably unlikely that Taylor Swift’s fan base care anything about intellectual property issues — assuming that they have any idea what IP even means.
Re: Re:
There’s NOTHING ethical about claiming to own single lines from lyrics from songs.
Look what you made me do....
Kind of surprising whatever law firm handles Oliver Hardy’s estate hasn’t filed against HER for using that – Laurel & Hardy skits are the first thing that comes to mind to us old farts when we hear it.
You know that a lot of recording artists do this, right? It’s a smart way to attempt to control who uses their image or their art and in what context.
Re: Re:
How long will it take for people to realize that once you’ve created a public image, it is free for the public to tarnish, adore, or even completely destroy?
That isn’t me being cruel, that’s the truth. It happened before the Internet and it’ll keep on happening. Sometimes for no good reason.
So some little people are getting a taste of Swift™ ®eϮ®ibuϮioⲚ ?
omg
“Considering the tautological nature of the disputed phrase, it’s unlikely Hall/Butler were the first to use this phrase, much less the only ones to ever think of describing the actions of players/haters as being, respectively, playing/hating.”
Just gotta say man, that made me really and truly laugh out loud. Thanks for that.
prior art
When did T.S. come up with the phrase “party like it’s 1989”? I might be able to dig out the issue of the libertarian zine The Connection (199x) in which Carol Moore used it to allude to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact (and linking it to the 11-year solar cycle).