JE SUIS CHARLIE" Not a Valid +33.01.70.36.61.30 Cmuyl@Foleyhoag.Com Trade Mark

Catherine Muyl "JE SUIS CHARLIE" not a valid +33.01.70.36.61.30 [email protected] trade mark

February 2015

Very shortly after the assassination of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris, millions of people used the "JE SUIS CHARLIE" slogan to express their shock and sympathy.

This slogan was apparently created by a design director who works for a fashion magazine, Mr. Joachim Roncin, who said he posted it on his Twitter account 30 minutes after the news of the event spread.

Six days later, the French Trade Mark Office issued a press release in which it stated that it had received numerous applications for JE SUIS CHARLIE trade marks since January 7 this year and had "decided" to reject them. The reason that was given was that the slogan had been so widely used by the whole community that it could not be appropriated by any economic operator and was therefore not distinctive.

It is very unusual for the Trade Mark Office to issue such a statement. No details were given in the statement about the products and services listed in all these applications. One can imagine that clothes, pencils and the like were covered.

What is surprising is that according to a well-established rule, when the Office or a Court has to decide whether a trade mark is distinctive or not, it must take into consideration the products and services listed. It often happens that a mark is considered not distinctive for certain products but distinctive for others. The view that a sign lacks distinctiveness because it has been used extremely widely, without any reference to the goods and/or services, is not in line with French rules.

What the Trade Mark Office could have said is that to allow anyone to register this mark would be contrary to public order. Public order is a quite flexible concept which has already been used in relation to slogans. Thus, in 2003, a political party filed a trade mark application for "Non à la Turquie en Europe" to express their opposition to Turkey becoming a member of the European Union. The Trade Mark Office and the Paris Court of Appeal held that this slogan could not be registered as a trade mark because to allow this organization to obtain a monopoly on this slogan would be contrary to freedom of expression and therefore to public order.

Public order would probably have been a better legal basis for the decision of The Trade Mark Office. It is likely that at least some of these applicants will challenge the Office's decisions and that the Paris Court of Appeal will have to give a decision on this.