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From: goodstorm@aol.com
Date: 13 May 1999
Time: 16:34:48
Copyright? I doubt very much you can copyright any names. Copyright is for protection of works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Do you mean trademark the names? It is very hard to reserve names under federal trademark law. Otherwise you would have companies like Procter and Gamble just reserve every word combination they can dream up. The law disfavors this. Names usually have to be in continuous public use to be valid. You just can't reserve them. Also, any name with the words "Red Wing" would be hard at first to trademark because the Trademark Office would probably view them as merely geographically descriptive. It would take five years of public use -- and also the name would have to develop a secondary meaning to the public in that time -- to overcome the legal presumption that disfavors geographic descriptive names. Thus, right now anyone probably can use any of those names. It probably would be very hard for anyone to bring an infringement suit until the names are used in public and for at least five years. Also there's the issue of whether certain "Red Wing" pottery-connected names were abondoned and went into the public domain.
That is, people may be using the Red Wing name on various kinds of pottery enterprises and may even have a valid government trademark, but whether those would have held up in a court of law is debatable given the case law. Fortunately, for the folks in Red Wing they probably have held the geographically descriptive name for more than five years and,, thus, developed a secondary meaning beyond the "place."