Fair and Balanced

[Ed Keer]

--- Frank Abate <abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
> It seems that in recent years there has been much
> broader claiming and
> granting of trademark and service mark status for
> natural phrases drawn from
> the language.  That is, not for names or slogans
> that specifically refer to
> a product or company by name, but for simple phrases
> that a company wants to
> reserve exclusively for ITS product or service.  You
> need not look far for
> examples.  The "Fair and Balanced" used by Fox is
> one, but others include:
>
> Home Depot: You can do it.  We can help.
>
> CVS pharmacies: Life to the fullest.

The company I work for (Medco Health) has one of these
taglines: "Live life well". It's trademarked as part
of our logo and mildly related to what we do--we're a
pharmacy benefits manager. Interestingly, we were told
by our lawyers that we should not use the phrase
except in our tagline. So we can't write copy saying
"We help you live life well" or encouraging people to
"Live life well", etc. We were told that this would
dilute our trademark. On the other hand we were also
told that our competitors could use those lines and we
couldn't do anything about it! Apparently the
trademark protections on these things don't go very
far. I've noticed that many of these phrases are
pretty close to each other (i.e. Nike's Just do it and
Home Depot's You can do it).

Ed

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