posted by Joe Polk at 9:23 AM /
"Light Up Night" in Mt. Lebanon will be no more, thanks to a cease-and-desist letter that the municipality received from the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership (PDP), the group in charge of the "Light Up Night" held in downtown Pittsburgh.
According to this article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Mt. Lebanon was the first of up to 20 more towns to receive these letters since the PDP owns the federal trademark for the name.
Our commercial districts manager, Eric Milliron, was interviewed about the article where he refers to ours as being a "Mayberry event". While I understand that the PDP wants to protect their trademark (and has every right to), I disagree with the comment from Michael E. Edwards, the PDP's CEO (also a Mt. Lebanon resident), where he states the following:
Is there anyone that quite honestly would confuse the two events or think that they were offering competitive programs that would make people decide between attending one or the other? As Mr. Edwards states, the Mt. Lebanon event is held the night before the Pittsburgh event, so if anything, I'm betting a number of people actually attended both events instead of picking one over the other.
Read more: www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_658168.html
According to this article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Mt. Lebanon was the first of up to 20 more towns to receive these letters since the PDP owns the federal trademark for the name.
Our commercial districts manager, Eric Milliron, was interviewed about the article where he refers to ours as being a "Mayberry event". While I understand that the PDP wants to protect their trademark (and has every right to), I disagree with the comment from Michael E. Edwards, the PDP's CEO (also a Mt. Lebanon resident), where he states the following:
"We were a little concerned, with Mt. Lebanon in particular, that they were advertising theirs (to be held) the night before ours. We thought it blurred our brand a bit," Edwards said.
Is there anyone that quite honestly would confuse the two events or think that they were offering competitive programs that would make people decide between attending one or the other? As Mr. Edwards states, the Mt. Lebanon event is held the night before the Pittsburgh event, so if anything, I'm betting a number of people actually attended both events instead of picking one over the other.
Read more: www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_658168.html
Labels: "light up night", commercial districts, eric milliron, Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership
3 Comments:
How about
LIGHT UP Mt. Lebanon the NIGHT before the city celebration ?
Joe Wertheim
This is the sort of thing that gives trademark law a bad name. Sure, the PDP has a trademark registration for "Light Up Night." But what's the point? So that the City of Pittsburgh can close its budget deficit by licensing the mark to other towns around the country? (Note that "Light Up Nights" in other countries - which do exist - aren't covered!)
Smart towns will change the name of their celebrations to "Light Up the Night" -- which is similar, but so obviously and purely "descriptive" (that's a trademark law term) that it would be clearly noninfringing. And those towns will send lumps of coal to humbug-meisters of Pittsburgh.
Towns that *really* want to lob lumps of coal at Pittsburgh would collect evidence that the "Light Up Night" mark was used widely beyond Pittsburgh between the first Pittburgh Light Up Night celebration in 1960, and the application to register the mark -- in 2003. That's 43 years of un-policed use, and more than enough time for the phrase to become generic. And even the grandees of Pittsburgh can't own trademark rights in generic phrases, no matter what the Trademark Office says.
I was a little hasty above: It's the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership [read "Allegheny Conference on Community Development"], not the City of Pittsburgh, that owns the trademark and is pursuing Mt. Lebanon.
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