Official reply from the president of Monster Cable here.


Well, what did we expect him to say?

I will withhold judgment pending revised information from Snow Monster's website. Their original claims against Monster sounded plausible...

tanstaafl.

I agree. The response is such an advertisement. He spends the first half of the response repeatedly saying "we're not suing anybody, look how much we like children and how great it is that I'm an entrepreneur." Yeah, it's great that he's done all this from nothing. That doesn't mean I'm convinced by his line. I think he's taking a page from the current book of spin by simply saying stuff and hoping people accept it as true. All I know is that he's a little less convincing than the sources that we've been seeing here.

from my understanding, trademark law says you must actively protect your marks. It doesn't give them carte blanche to issue blanket legal threats to anyone using a single word from the mark in most cases. Especially when the mark contains words as generic as 'Monster'.

If someone was marketing "Monster Wires", I could understand that. This prick is putting a spin on all of this to make it sound like it's legal behavior. It isn't..

He also says that they weren't going to sue Snow Monsters, oh ok. They were however trying to get them to sign a document handing off the rights to the Snow Monsters name, and had the audacity to state in that document that there would be licensing fees that Snow Monsters would have to pay to them to use the name. Nice. Real nice.

Looks like most of it was just not true... Snow Monsters retracts their earlier lawsuit against Monster Cable.

The untruth they're talking about was the product of some online discussions on other BBSes. The original letter posted by Snow Monsters didn't claim anything false, it just explained how Monster Cable Products had issued them a threat and their legal staff had attempted to bully them.

This is classic misdirection, as the issue at hand here isn't so much the filing of a lawsuit as it is the threat of doing so. Monster Cable has indeed had contact with a number of the companies it has asked the USPTO to "hold" on. Such news have been published by numerous sources.

I agree with protecting one's trade and service marks. But it's not worth damaging the reputation of your company by doing so in an almost frivolous manner. Attacking companies so far removed from the industry with such unrelated marks that no one would ever confuse products or services and which would certainly not dilute the good will nor "brand" of the supposed "established" marks. These games have hurt the Monster Brand in my eyes - and in the eyes of many other consumers. Brand is strictly in the eye of the beholder, and fr a company like Monster, it accounts for a large part of their equity. Dangerous games to be playing.

Bruno

Begs the question of whether the whole thing was a ploy by the small Durango company to piggyback on Monster Cable's growing, NEGATIVE 'net image/PR, doesn't it?