The HON Trademark Controversy Heats Up Baltimore
On a Chamber of Commerce road sign along a busy Baltimore corridor, someone has appended the word “Hon” to the end of “Welcome to Baltimore.” Ask most people who have lived there for a period of time and they’ll says that Hon (pronounced “hun”) is part of the charm of Charm City, as much as blue crabs and Orioles baseball. But Hon is now also at the center of a growing intellectual property controversy.
Around Baltimore, Hon is generally used in place of “sir” or “ma’am” or when one doesn’t know another’s given name, though it can also be used as a short version of “honey” and in other contexts. The term might be part of a greeting: “How are you, hon?” Or used politely at a diner: “Would you please hand me that salt, hon?” It is often associated with blue-haired, hard working-class women from an earlier generation with sixties-era glasses and big hair, a character right out of John Water’s Hairspray. Hon is as entrenched in the region’s vernacular as “y’all” is to those in the south, “bra” is to locals in Hawaii, and “fogetaboutit” is to New Yorkers. Hon is so closely tied to Baltimore’s roots that its use immediately informs the recipient of the speaker’s geographical residence.
It should come as no surprise, then, even to Baltimoreans, that the term Hon would be used by local businesses to sell their goods and services. What better way to connect with local customers? Denise Whiting, the owner of Café Hon and the founder of the annual Honfest, would certainly agree. Her Café Hon restaurant has been operating in Hampden, a northwest Baltimore neighborhood, for more than a decade; she registered the business name as a U.S. trademark in 1992. Ms. Whiting’s business also owns separate HON trademarks related to restaurant services, for paper goods (bumper stickers, napkins, and the like), and in connection with retail gift shops. Her HONFEST trademark, first used in 1997, is associated with “conducting entertainment exhibitions in the nature of community cultural festivals.”
But no one, it seems, knew about her trademarks, at least not until recently when the Baltimore Sun and others reported that Whiting’s trademark lawyers had successfully enforced her trademarks against a local merchant at the BWI Airport, shutting down the merchant’s retail sales of Hon-related products. The lawyers also interceded when Baltimore City wanted to use Hon-related images as part of an advertising campaign. In December 2010, a small group of vocal protesters gathered in front of Café Hon to voice their opposition to the HON trademarks. More recently, Bruce Goldfarb, a Catonsville, Maryland, writer, publicly challenged the trademarks by selling “Hon” mugs on his “Welcome to Baltimore, Hon” website, openly inviting Whiting to sue him so he could challenge the legality of the trademarks in court. Goldfarb and other opponents want Hon back in the public domain.
But that may be impossible in the case of Whiting’s marks, which she claims are incontestable. And it may take more than protests and unpredictable lawsuits to return HON to the public domain, because any decision by a court in Goldfarb’s favor would only directly affect Whiting’s marks, and may not bar the next person from trademarking Hon in connection with, say, the sale of bicycles or t-shirts on Ocean City’s boardwalk. Baltimoreans seeking a more permanent remedy should look West, to Montana.
Residents of the Big Sky state had a similar problem in 2001. Back then, a Nevada company called Last Best Beef sought to register Montana’s state slogan: THE LAST BEST PLACE, in connection with the company’s sale of meat, beef, clothing, accessories, even travel-related information. The vitriolic public response caught the eye of then Senator Conrad Burns and later Senator Max Baucus, who has inserted language in various federal appropriations bills to prohibit the use of federal funds to “register, issue, transfer, or enforce any trademark of the phrase THE LAST BEST PLACE.” His 2006 measure was challenged by Last Best Beef in court, but the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, upheld Baucus’ spending ban in 2007. As Sen. Baucus said on his official website, “Trying to trademark ‘The Last Best Place’ is as ludicrous as someone trying to patent a Montana sunset. If I have to insert this [appropriation] provision for the next 20 years, I will because that is how important this saying is to our state.” According to Trademark Office records, Last Best Beef’s trademarks and trademark applications are indefinitely suspended as a result of the Baucus spending ban.
So Maryland’s contingent in Congress could for do for HON what Sen. Baucus has done for THE LAST BEST PLACE. And they might very well succeed, though for such legislation to pass muster it may need to be limited to just preventing, prospectively, any new marks from using the term HON. Even if legislation could be enacted that affects Whiting’s marks, would such a measure be fair? After all, her trademark applications were laid open by the Trademark Office for public opposition many years ago and before the marks were officially registered, and no one then successfully blocked them. Time, it seems, has only made them stronger. Will the marks survive today’s challenges? As those in Baltimore might say, we’ll just have to wait and see, Hon.
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