A recent blog post at Wired reviewed the rather extensive history of the Toho Company’s notorious efforts to protect the Godzilla trademark. Cabzilla, Davezilla, the New Yankees’ unlicensed Godzilla promotion for Hideki Matsui–these are just a few of the references to the Godzilla property that the company has stamped out.
As we’ve discussed here at Blog@, companies have a strong incentive to take aggressive action–if they let infringement go unchallenged, a court may have a legal basis for finding that the trademark has lapsed. This can even occur if the entity appropriating the mark is a charity, which is why comic book publishers have on occasion risked the wrath of fans to shut down an infringing use.
In this regard, the Wired post raises an interesting issue. You don’t have to be a kaiju obsessive to catch the reference to Godzilla in the name of the Mozilla Foundation, the charity that is probably most familiar in connection with the popular Firefox browser. So why hasn’t Toho gone on a rampage?
The Wired piece suggests that Mozilla is different because it does not make a profit, but technically that isn’t accurate. Besides using the Mozilla mark in its fundraising, the Mozilla Foundation has generated considerable revenue, including millions of dollars in profit, from its search deal with Google. In fact, for the past several years the Foundation has delegated its major commercial operations to the Mozilla Corporation, a separate taxable subsidiary.
Perhaps Toho, like any number of other trademark holders, is balancing its trademark interests with concern for bad PR, but I’m not sure that’s the case. A New York Times article from 2002 offers this revealing piece of inside information:
[A] person within Mozilla, who said he could not be quoted because of confidentiality agreements, said that the organization had already worked out a deal with Toho that allows it to keep using the name.
As with the Transformers, there may be more to Mozilla’s trademark situation than meets the eye.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:55 pm
But the Mozilla trademark is just the beginning. If you do a search on the USPTO website, you will see that there is a trademark application for many -ZILLA names, including BLACKZILLA, DIFFZILLA, GUNZILLA, GRINDZILLA, AWARDZILLA, LASHZILLA, TORQZILLA, etc., all of which have been granted federal registrations (all with different owners).