Hasta La Creative!

This is all getting a little silly.
Dupont has been sending out cease and desist letters to Swedish bloggers who have the domains Teflonminne.org and now Teflonminne.se – in the latter link you can read PDF’s from Dupont linked at the bottom of his post (see Hotbrevet, Bilaga 1, Bilaga 2.) All links are in Swedish only.

Dupont are simply defending their trademarked name “Teflon”, something Hoover should have done before it became a term simply meaning “to vacuum” in the UK, and in Swedish the trademarked named “Jeep” is now synonymous with SUV, so any car that has SUV qualities is called a Jeep even if it’s a Honda.

Obviously, Dupont don’t want this to happen, and the way some trademark laws sound it seems you have to at least make a show of defending your trademark in order to keep your trademark so one could gather that the C&D is really just for show. However, Teflon became a registered trademark in Sweden as late as in 1999, while the word “teflonminne” meaning “scatterbrain”, “featherhead”, or plain “confused” as it symbolizes nothing sticking to your memory has been used in colloquial Swedish for much longer than that and even the dictionary explains that common usage includes describing stuff that nothing sticks on as in “teflon politician”.

Not sure how their trademark-defending case will go, but I know this for certain – C&D’ing random bloggers to give up their rights of their domains is buying Dupont and “teflon” a boatload of bad publicity in Sweden.

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