By Dan Mitchell, MLM Blog Correspondent
From The Consumerist:
Lazy Man and Money is just one of many sites (including this one) that have been critical of MonaVie, a company that has cleverly combined the miraculous, life-extending properties of the acai berry with the equally stupendous, wallet-emptying promises of a multi-level marketing company. Lazy (as the blog’s author likes to call himself) has, however, achieved one thing that other MonaVie critics apparently haven’t: He’s gotten the company’s attention, and they’re accusing him of trademark infringement.
In an email to Lazy Man’s domain registrar, MonaVie accused him of a raft of violations of the company’s trademarks, and demanded that he "remove all references to MonaVie and its products" from the site.
The MonaVie name and symbol are registered trademarks. (U.S. Reg. Nos. 3111333, 3111332, 78526279). MonaVie’s federal registration of these trademarks provides MonaVie with the right to restrict the use of the trademark, or a confusingly similar trademark, in any way that misrepresents the origin of MonaVie’s products or dilutes the MonaVie brand and goodwill associated therewith.
We were surprised to see an email like this sent to a blogger. While businesses have a right to protect their trademarks from abuse, the news media and individuals are typically exempt from such restrictions provided the trademarks are used as part of "news reporting and news commentary" — as well as a wide range other purposes, including parody and satire — and not as part of a commercial effort to mislead consumers.
To find out what was going on, we called MonaVie, and spoke to Doug Whitehead, the company’s associate general counsel. Whitehead admitted that the email sent to Lazy Man didn’t accurately express the company’s position. "We had a new person working in our compliance department," he told us. As it turns out, MonaVie actually supports Lazy Man’s "free speech rights," according to Whitehead. So, everything’s copacetic now, and Lazy can kick back with a Monatini? Not quite.
