RE: Trademarks Challenged

Dear R.T.,

I ran across an interesting bit of "trivia" today. It appears that the trademark for Burger Chef is being challenged by River West Brands out of Chicago. They filed their claim with the US Patents Office in January of this year. This probably explains the re-release of the "Big Shef" by Hardee's in February to the present.  Here the link.

Thanks,

Heath

Comments

[Greg Hamblin]

I was curious why someone would want the name as a new commercial venture. So I looked, and it's very interesting:

"Brand Reconstruction

River West Brands LLC is a highly specialized company that acquires rights to dormant consumer brands, revitalizes them for modern relevance, reconstructs the business model for today's market-place, and ultimately returns these brands to consumers. You can think of us as brand architects. We reconstruct brands and build them back up into gleaming, useful things.

Transforming dormant intellectual properly into reat businesses is fundamentany a challenge of reinventlon of the past... and invention for the future. It requires vision and skill. Ambition, too. In giving new form. substance, and style to brands, we always look for ways to make them better. We know that merely dusting off and trotting out retreads is not sustainable."

[Bill Long]

Hardees bought the rights to Burger Chef in 1997 as the last outlet closed down in Cookeville, Tennessee. I used to be a university student at the school a few blocks away from it! One of my professors always had his lunch there--he had the kiddie meal.

Anyway, when Carl Karcher (Carl's Jr.) bought Hardees, they also got the Burger Chef trademarks. That arrangement didn't last for very long... The contract only lasted until early 2007. I have been living overseas for the past ten months, so I don't get to hear everything. Perhaps Carl's Jr. paid some money to keep the trademarks. I don't know.