Courthouse News
David, again, prevailed over Goliath.
San Diego-based craft brewer Stone Brewing, an early leader during the explosion of craft beer in the early 2000s, won its yearslong trademark battle with beer conglomerate MillerCoors – now known as Molson Coors – on Friday.
An eight-member jury unanimously awarded Stone Brewing $56 million in damages following a three-week trademark infringement trial over MillerCoors’ use of the craft brewer’s “stone” trademark to advertise and market the rebranded Keystone Light economy beer in 2017.
Stone Brewing had asked jurors for a $216 million award for past and future losses and to cover the costs of a corrective advertising campaign to do damage control to the consumer confusion caused by having two beers on store shelves with the name “stone.”
Shortly after the verdict, Stone Brewing tweeted out a single letter: “W.” More
IDK, maybe I’m just too smart, but I’d never ever confuse that piss water stone beer with an Arrogant Bastard. I’m glad they won but the silly argument about consumer confusion is a stretch
Times sure have changed.
Stone was not a reference to beer when I grew up.
There is no way in Hell that one beer got confused with the other.
Cans,bottles, names and logos are quite different.
And I’m sure that there is a noticeable difference in price, marketing, and type of jackass drinking either.
The thing about MOST craft Beers are that they get popular and trendy, & them MOST fade off with whatever the next fashion trend is.
Eh, Hipsters?
“You guys wanna get Stoned?”
“Nah, I get enough of that from the kid next door.”
According to Bob Dylan, “Everyone must get stoned.”
The real crime is in calling the swill produced my Miller/Molson/Coors “beer”.
^ BY Miller, et al… dammit. How much can an edit button cost?
@Sorry about your luck — Historical tech note:
I miss the edit button a lot, too. iOTWreport used to have one but after various upgrades to site software, the performance here really REALLY slowed down and the culprit turned out to be the plug-in for the edit function. BFH & Co. quite reasonably took it out and we got our snappy response time back. Recently, BFH commented that getting EDIT back was on his to-do list, but at the bottom, so there’s reason to be hopeful as long as we don’t expect to see it come back in the near future given the work the crew has been putting in to stomp the spammers.
What Al said, -bfh
Get it in front of a jury, law or reason be damned the signaling of the most commonly known virtues will prevail. Do remember the qualities of a jury, the idle, those too thick to figure out an excuse and the tiny fringe minority who do their duty. Keystone is technically beer, it will produce the ‘bug piss’ effect less the hoppy part and sells mostly to people who don’t actually know what beer is (or like beer). It doesn’t sell against ANY IPA worth the name. This virtue expressed is ‘the evil corporation against the little guy’. Keystone light sells against the likes of Coors light and those are selling against the bug piss seltzers like White Claw, and losing badly.
Definitely not a beer drinker but every couple years I’ll p/u a 6 pack of Miller or Coors ponies in bottles on a hot day. Spent 8 years in beautiful Golden CO and visited the brewery a couple times.
We produce more lawyers every year than the rest of the world combined and China graduates as many engineers in 1 year as we do in ten. I like to stick around for the end of this Klown parade and the floats here in the middle are amazing, but I probably won’t make it.
in other news: The Rolling Stones are considering suing Stone Brewery for infringement
Bob Dylan is quoted as saying, ….
wait for it ….
wait for it ….
“Hold my beer”
… while Dylan Thomas promptly rolled over in his grave