Q. Is the "millennium" copyrighted?
A. Yes. Thousands of new products and services now bear the "millennium" label, with hundreds more using "2000", "21st Century" and "Y2K". Many US companies have filed applications with their Patent and Trademark Office seeking registration of the "millennium" name for use in their products, while there are over 3,000 pending applications. This means that we now have (and how did we get by without them?) Elizabeth Arden's Millennium Cream for our face, Adidas Superstar Millenniums for our feet and Lever 2000, the soap for "the body's 2,000 parts".
The scramble for trademarks began back in the 1980s when far-sighted/slightly insane people began filing applications for phrases such as "Countdown to the 2000 Millennium" and other such trademarks. By trademarking phrases and words that should really be in the public domain, they are now in a legal position to stop other people using them. So careful what you call your party at the end of the year - you might find a solicitor's letter coming through your door the next day.
The big craze now is to designate your product as an "official millennium" one, and already there is an "official" millennium beer and an "official" millennium light bulb.
One of the problems is that there is no Olympic-style organising committee to oversee millennium activities or marketing and the whole process is being governed by the normal laws of the market-place. Another problem is that people who are hawking their wares under the "millennium" name are confusing it with adspeak like "new and improved". Thus, the British supermarket chain which unveiled a £4 million programme to upgrade its trollies under the less than snappy slogan "a trolley for the millennium" is quite deluded about what the name means, as is Playboy magazine, now billing itself as "the official Magazine of the Millennium", and the Daily Mirror, which last year briefly carried the masthead "The Newspaper for the Millennium".
It all gets a bit silly when you realise that a New York company, Planet Marketing, holds the rights to use the term "Year 2000" on items of clothing and sent out a legal letter to a teenager in Maine, David Bettinger, who was selling "Year 2000" T-shirts in a local shop. "I was astounded that they could even get a trademark on the term," Bettinger told Associated Press. "It irks me that I can be receiving so much heat from people who are representing this generic term. How ludicrous is that?" Indeed.
Other entrepreneurs are less cynical. Ken Walker, a clothes designer, has spent the last three years and almost £400,000 securing the international rights to a series of numbers: 01-01-00 which will adorn 1,000 products, including millennium countdown gloves (with numerals on each figure), millennium sterling silver bowls and plates and alarm clocks. Warner Brothers, home of Bugs Bunny et al, are now in on the act with a new "Mil-looneyum" logo, although there is still no official confirmation of McDonald's launching a Happy Meal-lennium. Yet. One sweet company feeling rather smug about the whole thing is M&M's, because its name is the Roman numeral for 2000.
Incidentally, of the hundreds of trademark requests incorporating the word "millennium" that were passed in the US by the Patent and Trademark Office, 19 were misspelt (the double l and n are the biggest problem).
So watch out for those millennium cola drinks.
