All Shook Up: Elvis-Themed Weddings in Las Vegas Are Canceled in a Trademark Crackdown

Betrothed couples heading to Las Vegas eagerly anticipating an Elvis-themed wedding day may be sorely dissatisfied to discover that neither Elvis nor his likeness will be allowed in the creating. 

The corporation that regulations in excess of Elvis’s trademarked identify, impression and likeness, Reliable Brands Team (ABG), has made the decision to crack down on unauthorized consumers, issuing a stop-and-desist letter in early Could to chapels promising to convey the King to the wedding ceremony. 

Together with apparel brands like IZOD and Nautica, ABG manages the logos of entertainers and sports activities figures, like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Mohamed Ali, Julius Erving and Shaquille O’Neal.

 In basic, “once you file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Workplace it’s your work to search in excess of the landscape and if another person is working with your trademark without having your permission, it’s trademark infringement,” claims Henry Boyd, a medical professor of marketing at the University of Maryland School of Company. “You have to be your personal watchdog.” 

Trademarked names can be worth a lot and corporation emblems can be truly worth billions.  Organizations that don’t maintain an eye out for infringers could drop handle of their logos, Boyd states. “You really do not want your mark to turn out to be generic, or to engage in full or partial abandonment of the mark.” Just check with Kimberly-Clark, proprietor of Kleenex.

Boyd was stunned that ABG just now made a decision to go right after trademark infringers. “ABG obtained Elvis all over 2013,” he suggests. “So we’re chatting virtually a 10 12 months window. There have always been Elvis wedding chapels and themed parties in Vegas. Why training that ideal now?”

The affect of a new Elvis film

It could be related to the before long-to-be introduced Elvis biopic movie directed by Baz Luhrmann, Boyd suggests. “So there may perhaps be a spike in desire for the ‘King of Rock and Roll.’”

ABG did not answer to a ask for for comment.

The trademark regulations really do not apply to Elvis stay reveals or tributes, Boyd claims. That is for the reason that there is a appropriate of publicity statute, he claims.

Still, the publicity exception doesn’t deal with every thing. “If I use Elvis to draw men and women into a shop, by owning every person dressed as Elvis, so buyers can say they acquired their Iphone from Elvis—that’s not going to fly,” Boyd claims. 

This could be a case the place the trademark homeowners are shooting by themselves in the foot. Though boomers might all be bonded with Elvis, the more youthful established could not know that considerably about the King. “All these chapels in Vegas are keeping his memory alive,” Boyd states. “They have been executing [ABG] a assistance and this is likely to have a chilling result and shut them down. It may well appear again and chunk them if they’re way too intense in safeguarding their rights.”

It’s often feasible that ABG will inevitably make offers with all the chapels, letting them, for a fee, to go back again to using Elvis’s likeness and that the stop-and-desist letters are just the very first step in the procedure, Boyd suggests.