Comment by putlake
3 days ago
The way trademarks work is that if you don't actively defend them you weaken your rights. So Anthropic needs to defend their ownership of "Claude". I'm guessing they reached out to Peter Steinberger and asked nicely that he rename Clawdbot.
Last year in my area, a food truck decided to call itself Leggo My Egg Roll, and obvious play on Eggo waffles tagline.
Kellogg sent them a cease and desist, they decided to ignore it. Kellogg then offered to pay them to rebrand, they still wouldn’t.
They then sued for $15 million.
My old local brewery had a Leggo My Ego[1] beer they also were served a cease and desist by Kellogg over... they still make it, it's just now called the Unlawful Waffle[2] which is a bit funnier if you happen to know the lore/reason.
1. https://untappd.com/b/arizona-wilderness-brewing-co-leggo-my...
2. https://untappd.com/b/arizona-wilderness-brewing-co-unlawful...
Funny story but the taste scores don’t look to great. Do you like it?
2 replies →
Funny. I was expecting LEGO not Kellogg.
...and then what happened?
it’s in the discovery process with a deadline of February 23rd, at which time kellogg’s is to prepare their argument and motion for summary judgement. If that’s denied it tentatively goes to 3-4 day trial in July.
Court listener:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70447787/kellogg-north-...
Pacer (requires account, but most recent doc summarized )
https://ecf.ohnd.uscourts.gov/doc1/141014086025?caseid=31782...
1 reply →
Good question
https://local12.com/news/nation-world/kellogg-leggo-my-eggro...
3 replies →
[flagged]
It actually looks like they were pretty reasonable here, as they offered money for the company to help rebrand even though they were clearly infringing on their copyright. Of course, there are three sides to every story.
34 replies →
It's US law.
If Kellogg doesn't defend their trademark, they lose it.
An amicable middle ground might be for Kellogg to let the business purchase rights for $1, but if that happened it would open up a flood of this.
Kellogg has so much money in that brand recognition, they'd lose far more than $15 million if it became a generic slogan. The $15 million is a token amount to get the small business to abandon its use. Kellogg doesn't want to litigate. They tried several times not to litigate.
I'm sure Kellogg would be happy to pay the business more than the cost of repainting their truck, buying some marketing materials, pay for the trouble, etc. It's easy good will press for Kellogg and the business gets a funny story and their own marketing anecdote. It's cheaper than litigation, too.
11 replies →
> The way trademarks work is that if you don't actively defend them you weaken your rights.
I mean this is the OP sentence, it's not about the food truck, it's about setting a precedent that you don't care, which costs you later when a competing brand starts distributing in a way that can actually confuse consumers.
4 replies →
Honestly the decision to name it Clawd was so obviously spectacularly stupid and immature that it makes me wonder about the whole project? I won't try it.
Of course Anthropic has the most obnoxious legal team of all the ai companies. The project got traction under the older name. A name change does hurt the project.
It's not about obnoxiousness or morality.
They HAVE to defend their trademark or they'll lose it by default.
The law pretty much goes "if you don't care about it, you don't need it anymore".
I don't think it's obnoxious to protect your trademark against a literal homophone operating in the same space as you. I'm confident a lot of people heard about "clawdbot" and assumed it was an anthropic product.