Digital common land becomes a registred trademark

On the 10th of December 2010 the widely known and common phrase “<3″ had been registered by an Italian company. This phrase represents a heart. Many people all over the world use it to show their feelings over the internet when chatting with beloved people and relatives. It gives people the possibility to express a feeling via textbased messaging.

Now, it is a registred as a trademark. It is filed at 009438425, and you can see the details after entering this number at the search field at the Trade Mark and Design registration office of the European Union.

It is registered for:

• Precious metals and their alloys and goods in precious metals or coated therewith, not included in other classes; jewellery, precious stones; horological and chronometric instruments.

and

• Clothing, footwear, headgear.

Now you might ask “Why is that a problem, after all as many companies register trademarks?”
The main problem here is not the registering itself – this is another issue I do not want to discuss here. The problem is that people can come and take something from the digital common land and claims “this is my idea”. It can’t be tright. This is fundamentally wrong in so many ways:

• The phrase <3 is spread since years now over the internet. Noone knows who used it first. For sure, it is used for more than 8 years – this is when I remember the first appearance in some chatlogs.
• It belongs to the internet, not to a person and/or company. When will people start to register “:)” and “\o/”. I know that recently in Germany a company registered “STFU” which is as wrong as this registration. You can read about it here (Google translate!).
• Registering phrases, idioms or words is futile since you use them everyday to communicate ideas with each other, regardless of the support (may it be a tweet, a post on a wall, a sticker or a shirt). If companies can do that, they can forbid and/or ask you money for expressing an idea.

These are only three points and they do not question the whole trade mark reality – this is best done by other people. So, what we did now is to write an email to the trademark “owners”. Here is the full quote of the email:

Dear Sir or Madam,

It recently came to our knowledge that you are the “owner” of the registered trademark “<3″. We hereby ask you to give us answers on the following questions:

* Why did you register something which you do not own? It is part of the digital common lands and belongs to the digital culture and thus to the whole world.
* Don’t you consider it as stealing to register something that is part of the digital culture for years now?

We, the datalovers, are kindly asking you to stop pretending owning “<3″. You can sell shirts or anything you want with this logo on it, noone cares, but you have to release the trademark since it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to everyone.

Regards,

Stephan Urbach
Nicolas Baudez

//datalove.me
/telecomix.org

And now we are waiting for answers – let’s see if they understand – but let us be clear. We do not want to forbid commercial use. They can sell whatever items they want with a nice <3 on it. We just want to have this back in the public domain, for everyone to be able to use it.

On the 10th of December 2010 the widely known and common phrase &#8220;&lt;3&#8243; had been registered by an Italian company. This phrase represents a heart. Many people all over the...