Don't blame the legal department. They are legally required to send a C&D in situations like that or they can lose their trademarks.
Don't blame the legal department. They are legally required to send a C&D in situations like that or they can lose their trademarks.
That's an oversimplification. WH could also reach out and offer to work out a deal with the site owner to license use of their trademark. That would probably entail some compensation (which could be anything from "good will" or a token cash amount, up to millions of dollars) and probably some verbiage on the page reading something along the lines of "Logos and identifiers on this page are the property of Waffle House, Inc and are used under license" or whatever.
sure but thats also work that someone doesn't have to do. and the "house" was evidentally dealing with a disaster at the time.
Yeah, but it's work that would have had a great ROI if marketing had been fully in the game, which was kinda the point.
of course i would love to live in a world where waffle house can be as off the rails whimsy as kfc, but im just pointing out why not to get your hopes too high!
After the initial legal letter they could have licensed / agreed to the usage, or taken over the running of the website. There are several ways to protect their trademark without being killjoys.
What about the Big Mac index that the Economist uses to measure purchase price parity across countries?
The Economist editors don’t blog to reproduce every letter they receive from attorneys, and they don’t taunt McDonald’s on social media, and probably don’t host the website that tracks operational status of soft serve machines.
The equivalent would be a simple text list of all Waffle Houses currently closed, sourced by physically visiting each location and noting any closures. The author here used Waffle House's branding and logos, and also sourced the data by scraping their web site.
The economist can afford lawyers