I saw this yesterday and have been dreading talking about it, because it’s an issue that I have mixed feelings about, but mostly it just pisses me off. The European Union’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market Board of Appeal (now that’s a bureaucratic name if ever there was one) has ruled that “Anheuser-Busch can register it’s trademark “Bud” beer throughout Europe.”

This is just the latest salvo in a global slugfest with Czech brewer Budejovicky Budvar. Because of the dispute, Budvar is marketed as Czechvar here in the U.S. as well as many other countries, the ones in which they’ve lost court battles with A-B over the name. An earlier post I did also detailed Budvar’s take on the dispute. Yesterday’s ruling is also subject to appeal so I suspect that Budvar will in fact do just that.

Here’s Wikipedia’s summary of the ongoing dispute:

Although Budějovický Budvar was founded in the 13th century, Anheuser-Busch claims that the Czech brewer has been distributing Budweiser as a commercial brand only since 1895, 19 years after the Budweiser brand was first brewed by Anheuser-Busch [which was 1876]. The Czech company contends that its history, and thus its claim to the Budweiser name, goes back even further. King Otakar II of Bohemia granted independent brewers in the city of Budweis the right to produce beer as early as 1265. They did so in a style that became known as “Budweiser,” much as beers brewed in the fashion of another Czech city, Plzeň (German: Pilsen), are referred to as “Pilsner”, the company says.

In many countries, the beer produced by Budějovický Budvar is the only beer that may be sold as “Budweiser” — in those countries, the American Budweiser is usually marketed as “Bud.” Since both Budějovický Budvar and Anheuser-Busch have trademarks for the name “Budweiser”, they have been party to many lawsuits in a number of countries. In some places where it competes with the American Budweiser it is marketed with the names Budvar and Budweiser Budvar. Separate lawsuits have been filed in dozens of countries, including many in Europe and I’m not sure how this ruling effects the earlier local decisions.

Budějovický Budvar recently started having limited distribution in the USA and Canada under the name Czechvar. Due to its ongoing dispute with Anheuser-Busch, it cannot be sold in A-B’s home state of Missouri; however, customers have crossed borders to Kansas or Illinois, where liquor stores have posted signs reading “Yes, We Have The REAL Budweiser!”

From the AP wire story:

The Czech brewery was founded in 1895 in a town called “Budweis” by the German immigrants who founded it – a beer brewed there would have been known as a Budweiser. Anheuser-Busch launched its own U.S. Budweiser brand in 1876, picking the name because it evoked German brewers but was still easy for U.S. consumers to pronounce.

So A-B in fact acknowledges that the town of Budweis was the inspiration for Budweiser.

The AP wire story continues:

“We are making solid progress in our battle to protect the brand names we’ve developed,” Stephen Burrows, president and chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch International, said in a news release. “As a result, Anheuser-Busch can sell its flagship brand under the Budweiser or Bud brand in 30 European countries.”

The Czech company has argued that the name “Budweiser” should only refer to beer brewed in a certain area, in the same way Greek Feta cheese can only be produced in certain regions.

Anheuser-Busch has argued that the term Budweiser is simply slang used by German immigrants — the Czech company’s hometown is officially named Ceske Budejovice.

The European appeal board agreed the term Budweiser isn’t a special label, or “appellation” in legal-speak, according to Anheuser-Busch.

In addition, a related dispute has recently been highlighted because of the current World Cup. Bitburger, which has been around since 1817, markets their beer under the name “Bit” or “Bit Beer” which German courts have said is too close to Bud and that Bit has the prior claim in this case. This has caused some trouble for Bud’s sponsorship as the exclusive beer of the World Cup tournament.

As I said, I have mixed feeling about this issue. On the one hand, A-B did start using the name itself in 1876. That may or may not have been before Budvar did. It’s hard to say since their claim of a brewery being in Budweis since the 13th Century seems sound but whether or not the beer from that brewery was called Budweiser (or something similar) is frustratingly hard to prove to everybody’s satisfaction. Was the Nineteenth Century as fanatically obsessive about IP rights and trademarks as we are today? It certainly feels right that a beer made in Budweiss would be called Budweiser. It just rolls of the tongue so easily that it seems obvious, but that may simply be because we’ve all grown up knowing the name Budweiser precisely because of A-B’s efforts to promote the brand name. It’ all but impossible to tell. A-B argues that Budvar wasn’t sold commercially until 1895, but what is the definition of commercially? What was it in the 19th Century? They were probably selling beer in Budweiss/Budvar before 1895. They may not have been bottling it, but they were probably calling it something, even if they didn’t write it down. It’s likely that’s the way business was done all over the region. The industrial revolution didn’t happen all at once all over the world, so pre-industrial business that was less formal and more dependent on relationships and locality doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to me.

But even if we accept A-B’s argument that it’s been using the name longer and therefore Budvar ought not to be allowed to use the name of their town, I don’t quite understand it. Budvar and Bud are clearly not the same name, and both are different from Bit. A-B, of course, fiercely objected to and fought the name “Budvar” as being too close to “Bud.” This is the same trouble with “Bit,” too. Maybe I’m giving mankind too much credit, but I think people can tell the difference between “Bud,” “Budvar” and “Bit” even though they’re all beers. The packaging on all three is very different, bottles are different and certainly they taste differently. “Bit” and “Budvar” taste closer to one another than they do to Budweiser. Again, perhaps this is just me, but if you’re too stupid to notice the difference than maybe you’ve already had enough to drink. I’ve been involved in one of these trademark disputes over a contract beer I used to manage and the thing I noticed was that whoever is trying to protect their trademark is generally incapable of perspective. It’s an all or nothing attitude that makes compromise all but impossible. I’ve been literally screamed at for suggesting just such a thing. But I think most of us consumers could agree that having “Bud,” “Budvar” and “Bit” on our store shelves would not be much of a problem for us. We could figure out what we wanted to buy without too much effort.

Let’s test that, shall we. Let’s say you’re in a store looking at the beer on the shelf. Here’s what you see:

 
Tell the truth, could you easily distinguish which brand was which? Could you tell they’re weren’t the same? If you say no you either work for one of them or need to have your eyesight checked.

Okay, so let’s say now you’re at a bar and you want to order what the fellow has sitting on the table next to you. Here’s what you see there:

 
Is that too confusing for you? Do they all look the same? Do they even look similar? Does seeing this sight lead you to “brand confusion?” Of course not, that’s what we have eyes for.

We roam store after store buying everything under the sun and we manage to get what we want almost all of the time. I don’t mean to seem so condescending and I’ll apologize in advance, but here goes. Once upon a time in what seems like a previous life, I was a record buyer for a large chain of record stores on the east coast. They’re no longer in business but when I was there they were in thirty states and were the second largest record chain in the country. A couple of times a year a salesman from Disney would come by whining that the home office gets complaint after complaint because a customer was in a record store and bought a book and tape of Peter Pan (or whatever) and when they got it home it wasn’t the Disney Peter Pan but some knock off. Gasp! Oh, the horror. Invariably they’d point to it being on a Disney rack that they’d given to the store expecting us to keep it non-Disney free. Well like most retailers, we took a dim view of a supplier telling us what to merchandise and where. But here’s the thing. Even though the Peter Pan knock-off had the same exact name it looked so different from the Disney one that pretty much only a person whose I.Q. dipped safely into single digits could have confused the two. That’s not brand confusion, it’s just confusion period. And on some level, that’s the way I view these trademark catfights.

There will always be people who will be confused and we can’t — and shouldn’t — create a world so simple for them that rest of us are miserable. If you need the instructions printed on your bottle of shampoo, I’m talking to you. If you don’t know coffee is hot, listen up. If you can’t tell Bud, Budvar and Bit apart, it’s your problem and we shouldn’t kill a company’s heritage because some yahoo might get confused and buy a brand different than he intended to.

All three of these brands are legitimate brands who have all been doing business for more than a hundred years. When they were all relatively regional brands or at least stayed within their own country’s borders, there was no problem. But as the world’s commerce grows increasingly global in scope we have to find a better way then simply determining winners and losers. Because invariably whoever has the more aggresive posture and pays more legal fees is going to win. Especially when there is very little black and white to these arguments, who prevails has less to do with justice and more to do with who carries the biggest stick.