this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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I don't get it. Since when are similar words and cultural references and nicknames too owned by the trademark owner?
It was pretty normal for most of the age of trademarks' existence to use such derived references, including commercial use.
"He tried to claim ... a word play on "lamb" and not ... " - why would he have to?
I'm (ok, not really identifying as a fan of anything, but it's good) a Star Wars fan and I can point out plenty of such references there to other authors' creations, and George Lucas notably doesn't hide or deny that, actually the opposite.
They are owned by the trademark when the person owning/using the name is acting like the trademark. Trademark law is generally based around would someone be confused if they say the other one. I could start a house construction business can call it Lamborghini without a problem so long as I was very clear in all advertising that I'm only building houses and not in any way related to the cars - but if I start putting Lamborghini cars in my advertising I could get into trouble for creating confusion even though my competitor Joe's houses has cars in his ads. (this is obviously a made up situation)
From the article "didn’t develop the site, had attacked the company on more than one occasion, and tried to profit from its established reputation."
If he had developed that site in what looked like good faith he would have kept it. However all indications were he didn't care about Lambo as anything other than a get rich quick scheme and that will fail to trademark since the name is only valuable if it is confused with the trademark. A parody site (obvious parody) would have been fine. Obvious star wars fan sites as welll (though this could infringe on other trademarks so care is needed). Even adopting Lambo as his nickname could have worked - but if that was his intent he wouldn't have tried to sell.
That's fine. But suppose your brand is Lambozucchini and you have cars kinda similar to Lamborghini, but with the brand clearly different, just with homage, a bit like Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, where in the world is the problem with that? That should be legal, from common sense.
EDIT: Also nobody confuses Lambo with Lamborghini, a nickname is not confusion and trademark owner doesn't own nicknames. And they don't own everything in the world connected to their trademark.