alcohol beverages generally

Plenty of regulators don’t know or don’t care about the difference between wine and spirits. Paul Jorgensen reviewed a recent and noteworthy trademark dispute showing this. Paul is a lawyer and he explains as below.

If you’re reaching for a beer, you’ll probably not accidentally grab that bottle of vodka, will you? Looking to pair that great salmon dish with a nice chardonnay usually won’t mean that you accidentally grab a six pack at the convenience store, right? Yes, even though you know that there’s a big difference between beer, wine and spirits (how they are made, sold and who drinks them, for example), you may be surprised to find out that not everyone does. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, for example, does not know the difference and continues to demonstrate this with new legal cases decided through its judicial branch, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB). Who cares? You will if you are trying to register your beer, wine or spirits trademark. Unless you want to waste your money on an application that the PTO will reject, it is increasingly important to do a thorough trademark search first for any confusingly similar marks. That search should cover not only products the same or similar to your product (e.g., beer), but also all other alcohol products...

I can find plenty of alcohol beverages made in Romania, for example, from the above lookup at TTB’s website. But I can’t find anything from Saudi Arabia. Oh yes, it’s easy to say that Saudi Arabia is a major, majority-Muslim country and so I should not expect to find a single drop of alcohol beverages flowing out from or in to that country. Wikipedia says no less than 100% of the population is Muslim. On the other hand, Turkey has far more Muslims, at 99% of the population — and no less than 370 label approvals in the TTB database. A recent wine approval is here. Indonesia has more Muslims than any other country and also has about 25 label approvals in the database. Here is Panther Beer. Algeria has at least a few approvals. A wine example is here. Morocco has a few hundred approvals, with a recent wine example here. Egypt has a code, but I don’t see any approvals. Rounding out the top 14 Muslim countries, the following countries (in addition to Saudi Arabia) do not even have a TTB lookup code:  Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sudan. Some of these countries are so strict that not even soy sauce or vanilla extract is tolerated.

I got to talking with Dan Matauch the other day. He is a leading package designer in Michigan, at Flowdesign. I would have been impressed enough that he handled the design for Honest Tea. But he also handled Peet’s Tea, and Xango (aka Tiger Blood), and most of the designs really appeal to me. The list goes on and on, with Catdaddy Carolina Moonshine, Blue Ice Vodka, and the not-to-be-ignored Bawls and Stubb’s. I was fairly surprised to see that Dan worked on the package design for Pama Pomegranate Liqueur — and it had some kind of patent. The March 2010 press release says:

To differentiate its product, PAMA Spirits turned to the expertise of Flowdesign to develop a custom bottle that was both unique and could be patented. … Flowdesign is a unique branding firm where experience is infused in both brand graphics and structural design. Founded in 1997, Flowdesign has led the brand design field in custom structural design with 10 prestigious GPI (Glass Packaging Awards).

It surprised me because the conventional wisdom seems to be that it’s normal to get a trademark related to alcohol beverages — but it’s not realistic to get a patent. The conventional wisdom may be too simple. We have covered...