Marcel Winatschek

The Trademark Troll Came for the Bloggers

Someone found a new way to extract money from people who make things. A firm has been registering the names of existing blogs as trademarks—blogs that already exist, already have audiences, already have years of work behind them—and then billing the bloggers six hundred euros every six months for the privilege of using their own name. Retroactively. Ann-Christin, who’d been running her blog Fashion Kitchen for three years, received exactly this demand. Refuse, and the penalties climb to two hundred and fifty thousand euros.

The legal mechanics are almost elegant in their cynicism. You don’t invent anything. You don’t build anything. You file the paperwork first and wait. The blogger does all the work establishing a name and an audience, and then one morning they get an email explaining that they now owe someone else money for having done so.

This is the internet in 2014—unregulated enough that the scheme is apparently viable, and just legalistic enough that fighting it costs more than paying. Welcome to the frontier.