Paranormal romance author tried to trademark the work “dark” for her books

A trademark is a distinctive sign or design that marks your product or services as identifying your product or service. Trademarks have have to be unique, something someone else couldn’t easily stumble upon by accident; otherwise, people could just get trademarks on everyday words and symbols, and we wouldn’t want to forbid people from using those, right?

Well, you’d think so, but common sense doesn’t stop people from trying stuff. Take Christine Feehan, a paranormal fantasy and romance writer behind the bestselling Dark series, about the members of an ancient fairy tale race who mate for life. (Titles include Dark Prince, Dark Desire, Dark Legend, etc.) Late last year, she tried to file a trademark for…the word “dark.” And she didn’t want a trademark of some specific instance of the word “dark,” or some special design of the word; she wanted a trademark in “standard characters, without claim to any particular font style, size, or color.” So just the word then, as used in “[s]eries of fiction works, namely, novels and books.”

Just so you’re not in suspense, Freehan and her attorneys filed a “notice of abandonment” of the trademark mere weeks after they filed the initial request, hopefully because they realized that attempting to trademark the word “dark” was kind of a silly thing to do. I mean, there are lots of book series I can name off the top of my head with the word “dark” right in the title, to say nothing of how many books uses the word in the text: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and literally thousands more. This was never gonna go anywhere.

Which makes you wonder why someone would try something like this in the first place, right? Cause this isn’t the only example. In 2018, romance author Faleena Hopkins registered a trademark in the word “cocky,” and then went after authors with that word in the titles of their books to get their work taken down from Amazon. She eventually lost the trademark. Later, fantasy author Michael-Scott Earle tried to trademark the term “dragon slayer,” and later tried to get a trademark on book covers that depict a person holding a weapon.

Both of those requests were abandoned, which is the only correct solution next to never having filed them at all. Hopefully this trend it dead now, but it goes to show you there’s little people won’t do to try and game the system.

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h/t Boing Boing