TRADEMARKS CONTINUED

It's worse than I thought. This is actually the second lawsuit in Verizon's attempts to preserve it's Madison Avenue crafted, hip lifestyle-enhancing image untarnished. Newsrack Blog has the details.

Josh Cherniss is also ticked off by Verizon's image-making tactics, and he also directs (via Waldheim) folks to a union website where they can join with others to show support for the unions.

Naomi Klein helps make sense of why Verizon is so adamant about protecting the words coming out of their hipster adman's mouth:

In the corporate world, once a "brand identity" is settled upon by the head office, it is enforced with military precision throughout a company's operations. The brand identity may be tailored to accommodate local language and cultural preferences (like McDonald's serving pasta in Italy), but its core features-aesthetic, message, logo-remain unchanged. This consistency is what brand managers like to call "the promise" of a brand: it's a pledgethat wherever you go in the world, your experience at Wal-Mart, Holiday Inn, or a Disney themepark, will be comfortable and familiar. Anything that threatens this homogeneity dilutes a company's overall strength. That's why the flip side of enthusiastically flogging a brand is aggressively prosecuting anyone who tries to mess with it, whether by pirating its trademarks or by spreading unwanted information about the brand on the Internet.

At its core, branding is about rigorously controlled one-way messages, sent out in their glossiest form, then hermetically sealed off from those who would turn that corporate monologue into a social dialogue. The most important tools in launching a strong brand may be research, creativity, and design, but after that, libel and copyright laws are a brand's best friends.

The passage is from Klein's essay "The spectacular failure of Brand USA," which you can read here. Klein develops this argument further in her book No Logo, which is absolutely indispensible, in my view, if you want to try to make sense of the corporate strategy in these kinds of trademark suits. The basic claim that is relevant here is that corporations have engaged in an aggressive strategy of crafting brand identities around "lifestyles," and that this strategy has helped to produce a particularly virulent form of what Habermas would call the "colonizing of the lifeworld," but what ordinary folks can just call corporate takeover of common property such as language.

A while back, Norman Rosenberg (History and Legal Studies at Macalester College) wrote a book on the history of libel law called "Protecting the Best Men"; probably it's time for a book on trademark called "Protecting the Best Corporations," which could draw an explicit analogy between the attempt of early libel law to protect reputations and current trademark lawyers' attempts to protect corporate and brand images.