Last December, the folks who have been running the quite-successful Salt Lake City Comic Con lost a court battle over the use of the term "comic con." A federal jury decided that they violated trademark law and that the term "comic con" belongs to the folks who run Comic-Con International in San Diego. The Salt Lake group changed its name (temporarily, they hoped) to the FanX® Salt Lake Comic Convention and pushed for a new trial.
The other day, Judge Anthony Battaglia in the U.S. District Court of Southern California issued an injunction against the Utah convention using that term and ordered its proprietors to pay $4 million in legal fees on top of the $20,000 penalty set by the earlier trial. You can read the decision here if you are so inclined. The Salt Lake folks have said they will continue to fight.
I am not a neutral party in this. I have been a guest at all 49 of the conventions now known as Comic-Con International and am good friends with many of its operators. So give that whatever weights you think it merits as I quote something I wrote here last December…
I…don't see why anyone is fearful of the impact of this verdict. Can't the Boise Comic Con (if there is such a gathering) rename itself the Boise Comic Fest or the Boise Media Con and proceed without much of a speed bump? Are a lot of people going to go, "It's a Comic Fest? Oh, no! I only go to Comic Cons"? There are plenty of successful enterprises around the country that could call themselves "Comic Cons" and don't: Heroes Con, DragonCon, WonderCon, Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, Megacon, etc. Still, a lot of folks seem worried that the group in San Diego now wields some undeserved power to control the industry and wipe out its competitors. I don't see how anything is going to change except one or two words in some conventions' names.
I still feel that way…and I'll bet the FanX® Salt Lake Comic Convention in a few weeks is just as big a hit as it would have been under its old name. I'll also bet that other events around the country that use the term "comic con" in their names will change a word or two and it won't make one bit of difference to their attendances or proceeds. I dunno if this battle is over now but it won't harm anything if it is.