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Big companies enforce their naming rights
in corporate branding crusade against
small business owners.

Earl Farmer fixes Kirby brand vacuums but made the mistake of putting Kirby's name in his Yellow Pages ad.

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, Jan 29, 2004.

Earl Farmer doesn't know a lot about naming and branding. Farmer's House of Vacuums has been fixing vacuum cleaners in San Antonio for twenty years and regularly puts the brand names of the vacuums they repair in their Yellow Pages ads. Farmer is now in court because the Kirby Co. says he has no right to use their trademark in a list of a dozen brands he services. Kirby is a $900 million division of Scott Fetzer Co., a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. Farmer fixes four to five vacuums a day and pays himself about $500 a week. (Last April, we reported on a similar story, in which the Supreme Court threw out a Victoria's Secret suit against a small lingerie shop in Kentucky.)

Farmer had an earlier run-in with the company on naming rights.

Back in 1986, Farmer's Yellow Page ads included the logos of five brands that he serviced. Kirby's lawyers sent him a letter saying he could use their name but not their logo, and the ads couldn't suggest that he was a Kirby authorized dealer. Farmer changed the ad but refused to sign anything and the lawyers presumably moved on to harass other businesses who were buying supplies from them and refurbishing their machines. Robert Shumay, Kirby's vice president for consumer and public relations, said in an interview with the Washington Post that the company has been involved in over 200 similar cases in the past ten years.

How Kirby wound up naming Farmer's company in a lawsuit.

Farmer received a letter from Kirby in 2002. They demanded that he remove every reference to the name Kirby from his signs, his ads, his brochures, from anything he published. When Farmer stood his ground, Kirby sued him in federal court. They claimed his advertising was a source of confusion for customers who thought he was an authorized Kirby dealer when that was not the case. The suit was dismissed by a federal judge who ruled that Kirby hadn't presented any evidence to support their contention that they suffered damages at the hands of this vicious rogue vacuum cleaner repairman.

How far will companies go to protect their brand names?

Earl Farmer is in good company. An Armonk, NY psychic named Robin Mueller attempted to trademark her company name "SpiritInside." She had been using this name for five years. Guess who she heard from? Robin received a certified letter from Intel, informing her that they owned the right to any word followed by the word "inside." Intel, which apparently doesn't have a very high opinion of the intelligence of consumers, claimed that they would be confused into thinking that SpiritInside was connected with Intel. Maybe there is no spirit inside Intel chips and the company would benefit from this confusion. Mueller, who has withdrawn her trademark application but continues to use SpiritInside as her company name, is the one who is confused. "I'm talking to people who have passed on to the other side," she said, "and Intel is selling computer chips. I fail to see the connection."

(Editor's note: By the way, we studied the Vacuum Cleaner Review for this story, believing it to be the ultimate authority on the subject, but couldn't find any mention of Kirby vs. Farmer.)