Bassist Simon Tam talks about his band’s Supreme Court fight to trademark its controversial name.
“Things turned out a little bit different,” Tam told Reason several years later, on the eve of Supreme Court oral arguments over his trademark case.
Since 1946, the federal Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has been charged with blocking the registration of trademarks that “may disparage...persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” It was on those grounds that the agency denied Tam his trademark.
The San Diego–born musician, whose father was raised in the Hong Kong area and whose mother is from Taiwan, says the name of the band was a lighthearted (and hardly unprecedented) effort to reclaim an old anti-Asian slur. Their discography includes Slants! Slants! Revolution (2009), The Yellow Album (2012), and their latest, an E.P. titled The Band Who Must Not Be Named.
Since that initial PTO denial, the case has slowly, painfully worked its way through the legal system. Early on, an administrative review board conceded that the band’s name was “an attempt not to disparage, but rather to wrest ‘ownership’ of the term from those who might use it with the intent to disparage,” but rejected the claim anyway, finding that the usage was still “objectionable.”
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2017 من Reason magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2017 من Reason magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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