Black Friday: a trademark dispute

“Black Friday,” not only in the United States but in the old continent as well, is a combination of words that consumers recognize and associate with something specific. To be more precise, we could say that “Black Friday” is a distinctive sign, that is, a trademark, that distinguishes an event in which businesses, especially online platforms, offer their products at reduced prices.

In fact, not everyone knows that in Germany until 2022 “Black Friday” was a registered word trademark and those who wanted to use it to distinguish their sales campaigns with great discounts had to pay in advance for a license to avoid conflicts, or, settle for less dangerous alternatives like “Black week” or “Black Days”.

The rights to the “Black Friday” brand belong to a Hong Kong company who granted a license to another company “Black Friday GMBH” established in Austria. The owner took its rights very seriously, systematically sending a notice to all those who infringed its trademark, including Amazon, which in 2017 was sued before the Hamburg Court.

This situation gave rise to many discussions and legal battles that lasted until 2023 when, after five years of LITIGATION, courts in Germany rejected the appeal of the owner of the “Black Friday” trademark against the decision to cancel it for all the products and services.

The subject of the discussion was whether “Black Friday”, which first appeared in the United States in the 1960s in relation to crowded shopping malls, was suitable to be registered as a trademark. Those who were against argued that in Germany the expression “Black Friday” had already been established and that consumers already associated it with a special commercial event, shortly before Christmas. On the other hand, according to the trademark holder‘s lawyers, many would actually associate “Black Friday” with the great stock market crash of 1929.

Although in 2020 the Bundespatentgericht decided to cancel the “Black Friday” trademark for advertising services, it had to wait 3 more years for the trademark to be declared expired for all the other 900 products and services, following another lawsuit filed by the company Simon Gall.