You are an entrepreneur–we’ll call you Buddy the entrepreneur–and you have come up with what you think is a no-lose idea for a new business.
You live in the Nashville area, and you’ve been able to secure a space in the downtown area that is perfect for a themed bar and arcade–a fun place where people can go on a weekend evening and have drinks and play arcade games. You’ve seen establishments like this before, but you have some ideas about how you’re going to make your particular business special and different.
Maybe it’s going to be a cross between an Irish pub and an escape room that allows the winners of the escape challenge to make their way into a secret arcade room flush with the best and brightest arcade games of this year or any other year.
And you’ve decided to call your establishment “Buddy Boy’s Barcade Emporium and Good Times Venue.” You think you’re being original by combining the words “bar” and “arcade,” but you are wrong. Very wrong.
Brenna Houck, a writer for Eater.com recently published a fascinating article entitled, “Why You Can’t Call It a Barcade” with the subheading “No really, you’ll get sued.” Click here to read this highly entertaining and informative article.
What Ms. Houck’s article describes is a Brooklyn-based company that operates a chain of arcade bars and has the quirky name, Barcade. But what is important to the issue at hand is this: Barcade, Inc. of Brooklyn, New York, has a number of trademark registrations for the word “Barcade” used in conjunction with the operation of their arcade bars. Barcade, Inc. even has a trademark registration for the hashtag, #barcade. Here is that trademark registration just to show you that a hashtag trademark is a real thing – #barcade.
Getting back to the little story about the entrepreneur who wants to start up an arcade bar in downtown Nashville, if he decides to check into the name he wants to use for his business before he spends money, he will have made a smart decision. Just think how distressing it would be to put up an expensive sign, buy billboard advertising, get cards printed, spend money building a website, and otherwise investing in the name he cannot use–(i.e., Barcade).
As Ms. Houck makes clear in her article at Eater.com, if Buddy the entrepreneur were to go forward with his plans, he would likely have a serious trademark infringement problem on his hands.
So kudos to Buddy the entrepreneur for checking on the availability of the proposed name of his business before he got fully engaged in the business.
The moral of the story is to always investigate the availability of a trade name you wish to use before you invest time and money in that trade name. If the trade name is already protected as a registered trademark by another company, you are probably out of luck if you want to do with that name is in the same or similar line of business as the holder of the registered trademark.