Comment Articles

Feeding spam into the fire

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 07 Jul 2003 13:29 BST

I'm quite ready to answer the "what did you do over the holiday?" questions that follow every long weekend. I can tell my coworkers that over the Fourth of July, to celebrate freedom, I fed some spam to the fire gods.

And then my friends and I ate the spam. Or make that SPAM, the capital letters used here to distinguish the canned meat product from unsolicited commercial email (aka UCE). It's an important distinction because it's ending up in the courts. Hormel, which manufactures SPAM, doesn't like the way some companies are using its brand to describe their, well, anti-spam products. Hormel is suing a company that calls itself SpamArrest. If I were iHateSpam! or any of several other products and services, I'd be concerned. (SpamNet, anyone?)

The SPAM people are not without a sense of humour. If you and I refer to UCE as spam, that's cool with them. They say doing so doesn't detract from the value of their trademark. But they allege that SpamArrest does.

According to Hormel's Web site, "use of the term 'spam' was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which a group of Vikings sang a chorus of 'spam, spam, spam...' in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet."

People past a certain age may now stop singing along.

Hormel does not "object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lowercase letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters."

Interestingly, Hormel says the use of the slang term doesn't affect the strength of its trademark. Its lawyers cite a federal court case involving the Star Wars trademark owned by LucasFilms. Lucas wanted the White House and others to stop using the name to describe the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as, well, Star Wars.

The court found that such slang usage did not weaken the trademark and refused to stop its use. Hormel has other examples as well: Mickey Mouse, used to describe something unsophisticated; Teflon, used to describe President Reagan; and Cadillac, used to denote something as being high quality (as in, "it's the Cadillac of...").