Photo courtesy John Lemon
Copyright lawsuits are rife in the food and drink world. There was the blogger who sued TV channel Food Network for allegedly stealing her cupcake recipe and the New York coffee shop that filed a legal challenge against Starbucks over the Unicorn Latte. The coffee giant also became embroiled in a legal battle last year against the maker of Frappacino bongs (Starbucks won when the pipe-maker didn't show up to court). And now, it's John Lemon's turn to deal with the suits.No, that's not a typo.In 2013, a Polish drinks company registered a trademark for John Lemon, a new brand of lemonade. Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, however, wasn't pleased. The artist and activist sent copyright infringement notices to the company and its Europe-wide distributors, claiming that the soft drink's name breached the trademark of John Lennon's name and personal rights.In addition to using the name "John Lemon" on its range of drinks, which includes cola, pear juice, and black currant juice, the company advertised products using images of a John Lennon wall mural, superimposed with its logo. Another advert showed a pair of round glasses and the words "Let It Be."According to the Guardian, the drinks company "did not try to use the image of Lennon to boost its business" but has since agreed to change its name to On Lemon and sell all remaining John Lemon stock by the end of October. In a press statement sent to MUNCHIES, the law firm representing John Lemon said: "Having everything in mind, to avoid the extremely high cost of the court proceeding and to avoid the risk of banning the current production of the John Lemon lemonades to secure claim, our client decided to conclude a settlement."The makers of John Lemon may have decided to settle out of court, but William Miles of London intellectual property solicitors Briffa told MUNCHIES that proving trademark infringement isn't always straightforward.He explained: "It would have ended up in quite a complicated legal claim. Yoko Ono has the trademark 'John Lennon' and in 2016, she got it in relation to drinks. John Lemon registered it three years earlier in September 2013. What they [Ono's lawyers] could do is get that earlier trademark cancelled because it was registered in bad faith and say the current trademark is an infringement."Miles continued: "Generally speaking, John Lennon and John Lemon are also confusingly similar. The way you assess similarity when it comes to trademarks is threefold: Do they look the same? Do they sound the same? Are they conceptually the same? On that assessment, they would all be similar. They look the same, they sound the same, and they're basically the same thing because they're the name of a famous person."John Lemon isn't the first company to have been hit with a lawsuit for allegedly misusing the image of a deceased famous figure. In March, legal action was filed by Jimi Hendrix's family over Jimi's Wine and Purple Haze weed and Scottish-based brewery BrewDog was recently forced to change the name of its Elvis Juice IPA by the Elvis Presley estate. In a strange act of retaliation, the founders changed their names by deed poll to Elvis.Our advice to John Lemon? When life gives you lemons …
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