Nearly three years ago, Bell's Brewery, whose products I used to buy greedily, decided to oppose a trademark for Innovation Brewing, a tiny operation out of North Carolina. The reasons for the opposition are truly difficult to comprehend. First, Bell's stated that it uses the slogan "Bottling innovation since 1985" on some merchandise. This was only barely true. The slogan does appear on some bumper stickers that Bell sells and that's pretty much it. It appears nowhere in any of the brewery's beer labels or packaging. Also, Bell's never registered the slogan as a trademark. Bell's also says it uses the slogan "Inspired brewing" and argues that Innovation's name could create confusion in the marketplace because it's somehow similar to that slogan.

This is a good lesson in why trademark bullying of this nature is a pox on any industry derived largely of small players, because it's only in the past weeks that the Trademark Trials and Appeals Board in Virginia has ruled essentially that Bell's is full of crap.

The federal Trademark Trials and Appeals Board in Virginia says there is little chance of confusion by consumers and dismissed Bell’s action on Dec. 20.

Bell’s says it is moving on. “We respect the Trademark Office’s decision and look forward to doing business as usual,” the brewery said in an emailed statement to Xpress.

That's simply not good enough. Innovation is roughly one-sixtieth the size of Bell's, producing 500 barrels a year, and representing a zero threat to the much larger company. And, yet, for three years Innovation has been tied up in this federal action trying to simply register the name of the brand upon which it built its small business. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the claims that Bell's was making were plainly absurd. Those claims included stating that the words "innovation" and "inspired" had the same or similar meanings to the degree the public would be confused. They don't. It attempted to block a trademark over a slogan it barely uses and never registered. There was never any reason to do any of this.

Yet, we have three years of bullying action. At the end of that bullying, Bell's gets to waltz away and say it is "moving on", with the legal costs representing a decimal point on its ledger, whereas Innovation has no such war chest and was almost certainly impeded in its business having to deal with all of this. If that isn't the kind of thing the legal system should be better designed to handle, I cannot imagine what would be.