Yesterday, EDM Twitter discovered that Insomniac Events had filed to trademark PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect).
“This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
INSOMNIAC BRANDED PLUR 🤣🤣🤣🤣😭😭
I’m dead pic.twitter.com/G6yKhrRhVx— GLASSPΛCK.ΛV (@glasspvck) April 6, 2023
There is already a petition on change.org to ensure that PLUR remains “public domain”.
“Due to the widespread use of PLUR, there should be no legal ownership or trademark associated with it,” the petition states. “However, some individuals and companies have sought to claim ownership of the term, which can limit its use and prevent others from promoting its message.”
A quick update on what a trademark is from the United States Patent and Trademark Office: “A trademark can be any word, phrase, symbol, design, or combination of these things that identifies your goods or services.”
It continues: “A common misconception is that having a trademark means that you legally own a particular word or phrase and can prevent others from using it. However, you have no rights to the word or phrase in general, only to how the word or the phrase is used with your specific goods or services.”
In the original tweet, the word PLUR is depicted in a very specific font and style. It is the combination of the word, the specific font, the particular style, of a particular good or service that is trademarked, nothing else.
Grant Gilmore, founder and editor-in-chief at EDM Identity, shed some more light on the situation as well, highlighting that PLUR has already been trademarked many times and in many different use cases. Insomniac placing a trademark on a specific use of the word in a specific font for a specific purpose does not remove the word from the public domain, nor does it mean that Insomniac “owns” the word.
For anyone jumping down Insomniac’s throat about trademarking PLUR, several companies have either done it in the past and/or still have active trademarks, lol. pic.twitter.com/RQ1wsobmzG
— Panda Panda Panda ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (@czarcruise) April 6, 2023
If you need any more reason not to go after Insomniac for this, Frankie Bones himself, the de facto creator of PLUR, gave Insomniac his blessing. “Pasquale Rotella is absolutely the only person alive on the planet today who has done more for rave culture (than) anyone else,” he said. “So I gave my blessing.”
Frankie Bones says the PLUR brand should end, and he gives them his blessing. pic.twitter.com/oWyLJ1AeJr
— Panda Panda Panda ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (@czarcruise) April 6, 2023
The moral of the story? It’s not the end of the world, nor the end of PLUR.
