MINIUSA/MCO Trademark Update

Since this issue has gotten so much attention over the past week or so I thought I'd post this update from Mark at MINI Cooper Online:

TechTV interview – we did this Monday morning and had six other local MINI owners show up. Each was interviewed for his reaction to BMW's actions. We also provided some driving footage before they interview me with the TEAM MCO car. The TechTV interview will be aired Thursday August 14th at 8PM Eastern on their Tech Live show. You can find on Tech TV on premium cable and via satellite.

BrandWeek – I mentioned this last week after doing a phone interview with this industry magazine which reaches advertising and marketing execs around the country. The story ran as an article in an email which went out to approximately 10,000 subscribers.

Boulder Daily Camera – our local newspaper here in Boulder, Colorado. I did a phone interview with them yesterday and it is expected that a story on this will run in the Saturday edition. Hopefully, this will get picked up by the AP News wire.

Now…the information everyone has been waiting for….

We did receive a new letter from BMW's legal team. I'm not able to post its contents but I can saw that they attempted to provide some additional clarification on how they are classifying sites as enthusiast vs. commercial. I see this as a very positive step…if only they had taken the time to explain these classifications when they contacted me back in February so that time and money supporting legal counsel was wasted. That said, we are still reviewing their letter and will be following up with them this coming Friday. One concern that I have from their letter is that they indicate that enthusiast sites (eg – clubs) can not have links to commercial sites such as a MINI-focused vendor and be able to have MINI or MINI COOPER in their name. This is still confusing to me in that clubs do not typically have any form of financial benefit for doing so. As this is an ongoing issue I'll provide more updates as they become available.

Thanks again for everyone's support of the site and keeping the MINI community strong.

Well I suppose this is good news and bad news. BMW/MINI has responded to Mark primarily because all of the press regarding this issue. They've better defined what they're looking for and seem to be trying to reach out to the public a bit. Yet they haven't stepped away from the most radical part of their statements – not allowing MINI clubs to use the name MINI or Cooper in their title or url if they link to MINI related vendors on their sites. I personally find that stipulation pretty hard to live with.