Comments on: McDonald’s Loses Trademark Fight Against Malaysia’s “McCurry” Restaurant

By: richardbaron

richardbaron — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:34:25 +0000

The recent McDonald's v. McCurry ruling is not surprising. Just by the three main DuPont factors alone, appearance, sound and meaning, these two marks are arguably not confusingly similar. Add to that the difference in menus, and the difference in trade dress, and you have a pretty strong case for McCurry, which the panel seemingly accepted. The letters "Mc" cannot be totally, exclusively owned by one entity worldwide. And it's not as if people are going to mix up McCurry with McDonalds. Now, if McCurry used the golden arches, had a clown and similar characters associated with the restaurant, that would be problematic. Those elements were not present in this case. On our site, http://www.trademarksprotected.com, we help with these trademark issues and any trademark questions.

By: richardbaron

richardbaron — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 04:34:25 +0000

By: johnminh

johnminh — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:15:44 +0000

Ben, I'm not a fan of stinky tofu either, but I'd definitely visit S.T.FU! =)

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:58:56 +0000

As far as registered trademarks go, you have to enforce it or you lose TM status. I’m not so sure about McStinkyTofu either. I mean, I never liked Stinky Tofu to begin with but you’d be better off with a brand name like S.T.FU …. haha. Marketing brain at work! :p

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:58:00 +0000

By: Ben Hwang

Ben Hwang — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:02:57 +0000

As far as trademarks go, you have to enforce registered trademarks or else you lose them.

As far as McStinkyTofu goes, I never cared for Stinky Tofu anyways…. but I personally would rather go with a brand name of “S.T. FU” since you could totally do crazy things with it and it could catch on pretty easily. What can I say, it's the marketing brain at work.

By: JC John (ᜑᜓᜏᜈ᜔/謝施洗)

JC John (ᜑᜓᜏᜈ᜔/謝施洗) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:16:38 +0000

Amazing. I never thought McDonald's is strictly enforcing their trademark. I mean, here in the Philippines we see "Mc" prefixes but we never heard anything about the company enforcing their trademark or any similarity to their name.

I'm not a trademark expert (I'm not even a law expert) but I side with the court here in that the signage is different (probably even the font too), and they're not serving the same menu as McDonald's.

That's why I don't know why McDonald's is enforcing their trademark in this case. I would understand why Xerox and Nintendo will enforce theirs (Xerox and GameBoy respectively). Here in the Philippines, Xerox lost their trademark decades ago. Filipinos call "photocopy" as "xerox". We call the "photocopier" machines as "xerox" machines. (Personally, I think in Xerox's case, their dominance backfired.)

Oh well, I hope an expert can shed more light ^_^