No, Trademark Squatting On Anti-Israel Phrase Won’t Keep It From Use

For some reason, there are enough people who are ignorant enough about trademark law such that every once in a while you get people who don't like a thing trying to trademark that thing thinking they can prevent that thing from being done or used. It's a form of trademark squatting. Confused? An example would be one man who thought he could keep the NFL's Raiders in Oakland merely by applying for a trademark on San Antonio Raiders," where the team was rumored to relocate to. Stuff like that doesn't work, primarily because you have to actually show a use of the trademark in commerce, or at least a valid intent to use it. You don't get to go out and trademark something merely to sit on it and prevent someone else from using it.

Which brings us to the war between Israel and Hamas. The brutal conflict is raging once more, as are various political discussions around it. One phrase you are likely to have heard at some point is: From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free." To be clear, that phrase is a hateful, anti-Israel rallying cry that calls for the abolition of the state of Israel. That isn't to say that there shouldn't be a Palestinian state, of course, but to pretend like that statement calls for anything less than the destruction of Israel as a state is silly.

Equally silly is two Jewish men in America somehow thinking that they're going to control the use of the phrase merely by trying to trademark it.

Two Jewish American men have submitted separate trademark applications for the expression from the river to the sea," triggering a flurry of reactions. A prominent legal expert has cautioned that the move might have unintended consequences for boththe Jewish communityand Israel.

Joel Ackerman and Oron Rosenkrantz filed trademark applications for the phrase that refers to the geographic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, encompassing Israel and the Palestinian territories.

This is pointless at best, and potentially counterproductive to the goal at worst. It's pointless for a number of reasons. For starters, it's very unlikely that either trademark application will be approved at all. It's a widely used political phrase that does nothing to serve as a source identifier of a good. But even if it were granted, it would be for an extremely limited type of goods, such as t-shirts and hats. No such mark would prevent the phrase from being said, chanted, written, nor used on all sorts of other products. It's simply not going to stifle any real use of the phrase, so what's the point?

We don't know for sure what the outcome will be, but the chances [of their receiving these trademarks] is not that good," Katzenelson said. Since it only applies to hats and shirts, stopping its use on other services and goods would be very difficult."

The counterproductive piece is somewhat akin to the Streisand Effect. Whatever contact the general public has had with this anti-Israel message, now that message is being written and talked about all the more thanks to this attempt to trademark it. And there's certainly no guarantee that those who come across the message, thanks to all of this, will take the same view of it as these two gentlemen.

Now, again, I don't expect that these applications will be approved at all. But the point is that there was no reason to attempt any of this to begin with.