Smash Notes
Being Sued by Caterpillar Inc.
Caterpillar Inc., a company that generated $54.7 billion in sales and revenue in 2018 alone, is suing us in an attempt to cancel our Class 25 trademark to "Cat & Cloud." Baca and Chuck sit down to talk about what this means and how we're moving through it. If you want to help please share and pass this along and share on your social platforms. We…
Notes
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"Cat & Cloud" already have the trademark, and they are always using it in conjunction with the word "cloud." Meanwhile, Caterpillar Inc, the maker of heavy machinery making over 54 billion dollars in revenue last year, is still suing this coffee shop in in an attempt to reverse their trademark around the word "Cat". Why?
As it's indicated by the podcast hosts, Caterpillar is doing this to a number of small businesses because they have a trademark for the work "Cat" as an abbreviation to the word "Caterpillar."
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Theoretically you cannot, but if you are a multi-billion dollar company that is trying to own every variation of your name, then apparently cat is a fair game, and bleeding your local business dry is none of your business.
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On the Cat & Cloud Podcast, the owners say Caterpillar Inc. wrote on August 4, 2018 to cancel the Cat & Cloud trademark. They do not believe anyone will mix their coffee up with Caterpillar's machinery, or with the yellow triangle and the block-letter CAT mark. The case is already into the thousands of dollars and, they say, can run for years, perhaps to $10,000 or $20,000. A year after the letter they were still early, collecting documents toward a possible trial. Caterpillar can absorb that bill. Cat & Cloud raised $35,000 on Kickstarter to buy its roaster, so $20,000 is a real share of a shop build. They plan to fight rather than drop the name.
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Once you get the original notice of the lawsuit, you get to file a response. From then, the originator can come back with a "discovery" process, requesting documents about your business and its financials, asking questions that may help them in suing you. In this case, once Cat & Cloud filed the response, they also asked for the same information from Caterpillar Inc. There's no end to how much information each one can request, meaning whoever has more money can keep draining the other side's time and finances. The process is stacked against the little guy.