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A comment on Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'Monster'.

Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by chankstein38 on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:20PM (#35445989)
What in the world? I thought trademarks and copyright law were based on market and context? Now just using the word monster is too much for Monster Energy? They're lucky Bobby Pickett let them use the word Monster for their chemical water company if these things can be applied this broadly...
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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by burnte on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:21PM (#35445995)
Yeah, a good lawyer will actually be able to get Monster to settle, or at least win in court. This is a huge reach, no judge will ever say games and drinks are too closely related.
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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by onion2k on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:26PM (#35446043)
Except... Monster sponsor a lot of gaming things, so they might have applied for and been granted ownership of "Monster" as a trademark, designmark, and copyright within the gaming market as well. Also, I think there's at least one Monster branded supercross video game. They also have https://twitter.com/MonsterGaming

Suggesting they only have drinks interests is not correct.

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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by failrate on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @06:31PM (#35446726)
They registered "monster energy" and included games in the sea of producr categories: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4805:lk...
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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by schiffern on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:59PM (#35446396)
>I thought trademarks were based on market and context?

They are.

Monster Energy holds trademark SN 97273630,[0] which covers:

"Downloadable virtual goods in the field of beverages, food, supplements, sports, gaming, music, and apparel"

...among many other things.

[0] (basic search for 97273630, change "field" dropdown to serial number) https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search

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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by thfuran on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @06:03PM (#35446431)
Since when is "beverages, food, supplements, sports, gaming, music, and apparel" a field?
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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by JohnFen on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @06:14PM (#35446532)
They're different categories. When you register a trademark, you specify which categories the trademark applies in. Those are the ones Monster chose.

An interesting side-note -- a company actually has to be using the trademark in commerce in the specified categories in order to qualify for trademark protection. This implies that Monster has products on the market of each type in the list.

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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by thfuran on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @06:23PM (#35446646)
>They're different categories.

I quite agree, which is why I'd expect them to be referred to as fields rather than field.

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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by corvec on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @08:50PM (#35447828)
They apparently have a video game series - Monster Energy Supercross 1-5: The Official Videogame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Energy_Supercross%3A_T...
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Re:Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev for Using the Word 'M... by 3guk on Wednesday April 05, 2023 @01:01PM (#35457211)
Owned and developed by Milestone I believe.
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