Forcing a Point? Oatly Attempts to Register "Barista" as a Trademark!

According to foreign media reports, the globally renowned oat milk company attempted to register "Barista" as a trademark in New Zealand this September — and ran straight into opposition from Bidfood, one of New Zealand's major food wholesale companies.

In September of this year, Oatly filed an application with the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office to register "Barista" as a trademark. Bidfood opposed it immediately, arguing that the term "Barista" has been used on various plant-based milk products in the country for nearly a decade and should be considered a generic term, given that no company had ever managed to register it before.

Oatly, however, claimed that "Barista" is not a generic noun at all, because over the years consumers have immediately associated the word with Oatly's oat milk rather than with other plant-based or dairy alternatives.

Bidfood called that justification unreasonable! It may look like "no harm, no foul," but if the registration were approved, it would set a precedent for exactly this kind of nonsense claim from companies like Oatly.

Only a company like Oatly (the original text cited Monster Energy as its example) would litigate over descriptive terms or try to trademark a generic word already in wide use across the market.

Ultimately, the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office sided with Bidfood, finding that consumers would expect the term "Barista" on any dairy alternative — soy milk included — to mean exactly the same thing as it does on oat milk. Dairy alternatives compete with one another to a real degree, and consumers make direct comparisons when the products sit side by side on a shelf.

Dr. Valentyna Melnyk, the IPO expert witness who served as the "referee" in the case, added that dairy alternatives exist to imitate consumer demand for dairy products, and the term "Barista" should not be used to distinguish one type of dairy alternative from another.

Similar Cases in China

Closer to home, some merchants have recently been trying to register "Geisha Coffee" — a generic term in the coffee industry — as their own product trademark, and some of those applications have already been approved by the Trademark Office.

The whole point of trademark registration is that the registrant gains exclusive rights to the mark, protected by law: others dare not imitate it, on pain of infringement suits and economic damages. But a system designed to protect trademark holders' rights now brings significant potential risk to entire industries.

Generic terms are names for certain products or services that are legally or conventionally established and widely used within a specific field. Every industry has them — the trouble is that trademark examiners cannot possibly be familiar with the generic terms of every industry.

And so, even though Article 11 of China's Trademark Law stipulates that generic terms cannot be registered as trademarks, there is currently no way to completely prevent the registration of generic marks that are not widely recognized by the general public.

The Future Impact

Just imagine: if "Barista" had actually sailed through this trademark registration, what exactly would we be calling baristas in the future?

Image source: Internet

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