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Caymus Vineyard Sues Caymus Builders Because It Built Some Buildings For Its Wine Business

from the not-how-it-works dept

Look, trademark law can be confusing. If you’re not spending some significant portion of your life either practicing trademark law or writing about trademark law, you might misunderstand how it works. In particular, the requirement for entities to be in the same business or market often times trips people up, with them either not realizing that this provision exists for there to be trademark infringement in most cases, or else not understanding exactly what it means to be competing in the same marketplace.

But my understanding and generosity in this is heavily strained when a winery sues a construction company just because the winery built stuff on its property.

According to a filing in San Francisco’s U.S. District Court, dated March 2, Sonoma’s Caymus Capital is being sued, along with other related parties, by Caymus Vineyards of Napa.

The suit cites the defendants’ “unauthorized and unlawful use of Plaintiff’s famous, incontestable federal trademark registration for the mark ‘Caymus’ and Plaintiff’s corporate and trade name ‘Caymus Vineyards.’”

By way of background, Caymus Capital is related to Caymus Builders, Caymus Residential Recovery, and other related businesses, all of which are also named in Caymus Vinedyards’ lawsuit. To be clear, none of these companies are in the wine business. All of them are in the building and construction business. Readers of this site will already be scratching their heads wondering what argument the winery might be making in order to assert that any of this is trademark infringement.

Well, there are two arguments in the lawsuit, both of which are equally flimsy. First, as part of its wine business, Caymus Vineyards asserts in its filing that it builds stuff.

The suit explains that Caymus Vineyards has engaged in building projects on its own properties, primarily in the Napa Valley, and is currently developing a winery, bottling and distribution complex in Solano, where it does business as Caymus-Suisun.

None of which makes it a builder or construction company in the commercial marketplace. Were this to equate to trademark infringement, construction companies would likely have to go unnamed entirely, because every industry has to build stuff to be an industry.

In the complaint itself, Caymus Vineyards also complains that Caymus Builders, which is located in nearby Sonoma, tried to help with the recovery efforts from last year’s devastating wildfires that rocked Wine Country.

Since that time, Defendant Caymus Builders LLC has advertised its services along the Napa-Sonoma corridor, presumably as part of the re-building process. … The highly visible signage advertising Defendant’s goods and services alongside vineyard properties will likely cause confusion, mistake, or deception as to the source, affiliation, sponsorship or authenticity of Defendant’s goods and services.

Say it with me now: none of this makes Caymus Vineyard a builder, nor does it make Caymus Builders a winery. All of this complaining is silly, as are claims that anyone is going to confuse the quite famous Caymus Vineyards winery with a construction company.

Hopefully the court will see clear to putting the cork back in this disaster of a trademark suit.

Filed Under: competition, construction, different industries, trademark, use in commerce, wine
Companies: caymus builders, caymus vineyard

DailyDirt: A Long Time To Make Really Big Stuff…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In the software world, it’s widely known that throwing more people at a (delayed) project can make it take even longer to finish instead of speeding things up. (See Brooks’s Law) Maybe folks are learning how to cope with this management dilemma, but it looks like the solutions might involve throwing even more people AND more money to get projects to finish on time. The most practical answer, though, might be to come up with more realistic budgets and schedules. However, there are plenty of examples that practical proposals are not forthcoming. Here are just a few construction projects that have faced delays, and we may still have to wait a few years to see how they actually turn out.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bay bridge, brooks' law, construction, hyperloop, sky city, skyscraper, tallest building, tunnel project