STARBUCKS
Copycat marks that infringe Starbucks' IP
It is difficult to walk down a shopping street in London without seeing one. New York alone has several hundred. Argentina, Ireland, Tailand and Bulgaria all boast branches. Starbucks is, seemingly, ubiquitous. And that’s just the coffeehouses. Add the countless references to the brand in Hollywood films, US TV shows, newspapers, magazines and on the Internet, and you could be forgiven for thinking that no corner of the globe remains untouched by the Seattle company.
However, despite impressions to the contrary, Starbucks does not have outlets everywhere. And if it doesn’t have outlets everywhere, entrepreneurs in those places where there are no well-known coffeehouses might take the opportunity to ride on the back of the Starbucks brand to attract new custom.
Tracking down and dealing with this kind of infringement is one of the tasks facing Batur Oktay and Kim Teraberry, Starbucks’ corporate counsel responsible for IP. Given that they manage approximately 10,000 trademarks, it pays to be vigilant.
“I think we’re pretty aggressive about it—we have stores in more than 50 countries so we have partners [Starbucks’ employees are known as partners] in more than 50 countries, and we have so many millions of customers and whenever they travel, we get reports of infringement very quickly,” says Oktay. “We have a customer service phone line and email address so a lot of concerns
30 World Intellectual Property Review May/June 2010
come in that way, and then we also have a legal email address:
copycat@starbucks.com. We get a lot of material sent to that email address and we check it daily, sometimes multiple times a day.”
And it’s not just customers and partners that pick up the phone to sound the alert. Teraberry says: “We also use watch notices, we have our investigators in Asia, outside counsel, and then other trademark owners sometimes too will notify us of infringements.”
Some of the infringements are blatant copies, some are distortions of the company’s ‘siren’ logo and others are (sometimes inappropriate) corruptions of the Starbucks name itself. Even the coffee blends the company uses are targets. Teraberry says that “some of the logo infringements can be pretty entertaining”.
Te approach to infringement varies depending on its gravity and location, but Oktay explains, once the company hears of a potential problem “depending on the country, we’ll contact counsel. If we need an investigation then we’ll conduct an investigation and then see what the matter merits—a letter, a phone call, if it’s really an infringement, if it’s actionable or not.”
Normally, the first course of action is to send a cease and desist letter to the party Starbucks suspects is infringing; this can resolve the issue or sometimes lead to further negotiations. Litigation is a last resort, but that doesn’t mean the company won’t use it if necessary.
www.worldipreview.com
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