Trademarks: Sometimes David Is Petty And Goliath Deserves To Win

Long time readers of Techdirt will recall the deluge of posts we did years ago on trademark disputes within the craft beer industry. While trademark issues in that industry certainly haven’t gone entirely away, they are nothing like what was occurring between 2015 and 2020. In that time period, it felt like I was writing up a handful of posts on trademark disputes within the industry per week. That’s how you get folks like me warning of an impending trademark apocalypse in the industry and industry journalists declaring that craft beer is “the most IP product ever”.

So why didn’t the apocalypse come? Simple! The industry’s growth stagnated and, in fact, shrunk a bit. That means fewer new players in the industry making new brews, which means fewer new names and trade dress for those brews, which means fewer disputes. That and industry consolidation is all you need for the trademark dispute problem to shrink to manageable levels.

But that doesn’t mean the silliness is gone. And, actually, sometimes the vector for said silliness is the opposite of what you might expect. While there is a ton of trademark bullying done by big corporate entities with large legal war chests, sometimes it’s David, not Goliath, that is acting the fool. And the case of an Atlanta Brewery, Monday Night Brewing, appears to be one good example of that.

Just in time for the Super Bowl, Molson Coors came out with a new ad campaign and some new packaging for its well-established beer brands to support it.

Beer giant Molson Coors kicked off an ad campaign for Coors Light that bears a resemblance in name to Monday Night Brewing.

“Instead of doing ‘Monday Night’, they’re doing ‘Mondays Light’,” Iverson explained. “Two, a ‘case of the Mondays’, and that’s a little too close for comfort.”

The latter is named after the popular quote from the film “Office Space”, where the film’s protagonist is chastised by a coworker for his attitude.

Monday Night Brewing sent Molson Coors a cease-and-desist letter saying it owns the trademark on beer-context use of “Monday Night.”

So that there is no misunderstanding, this is the sort of thing we’re talking about.

There was never a reason to send a C&D notice for this. Not only is every last thing about the packaging here identical to the previous Coors packaging except for changing “Coors” to “Mondays” (down to the slogan and the fact that the old logo appears at the bottom), there is also nothing that looks anything like Monday Night Brewing’s trade dress. It’s just that Molson Coors dared to use the word “Monday”. That’s all there is here.

Which is why Molson Coors responded to the C&D with, essentially, “nah, bro.”

Molson Coors didn’t respond to the letter until the day before the Super Bowl, denying they violated the trademark, saying in part the visuals involved in the campaign were markedly different and that “Monday” is a fair-use term. A commercial pushing the campaign aired during the Super Bowl.

“That’s a little bit of a gut punch,” Iverson said.

Oh, the melodrama. If Iverson at some point can produce any sort of evidence that Coors’ ad campaign, which is only going to run for a short period of time, has caused any actual confusion and/or decline in sales for Monday Night Brewing, I’ll change my mind. But I don’t for a second anticipate that evidence showing up, because there’s nothing in any of this that represents a threat to the brewery nor something the average beer-consumer is going to be confused over.

Sorry, David, but I’m rooting for Goliath on this one.