Don't Do This, Ever: Self-Published Author Abuses Trademark Law To Bully Her Competitors

Jake

Jake

Location
The Midlands.
Or, as another indie writer who wrote up a blogpost summarising this fiasco put it: Faleena Hopkins Cocks The Whole Entire Fuck Up

Have you ever noticed how a lot of erotic romance novels have similar titles? For example, Fifty Shades of Grey spawned titles like 12 Shades Of Desire, and after the publication of Beautiful Bastard and Manwhore a ton of books came out with increasingly profane titles? For the last couple of years, the word "cocky" has been popping up on romance novel covers. A lot of them.
Author Faleena Hopkins certainly likes to use the word in her book titles. See, Hopkins knows the importance of a brand, as she discusses in her blog post about being the first self-published author to ever photograph her own cover models (she is definitely not). Other authors were copying her on purpose. By…using stock photos that she had coincidentally also used...

[...]

... Hopkins decided that she needed to protect her brand. Since her Cocker Brothers series all have titles that start with "Cocky," the next obvious step was to actually trademark the word "cocky."
Because no one in their right mind would think, "I need to monitor all the notices and postings about potential trademarks in case someone tries to pull some shady bullshit and trademark a common adjective used on erotic romance novel titles," no one had enough notice to challenge it. She now owns the word "cocky" and it's no longer usable in any romance novel title.
The issue came to light when authors suddenly received copyright violation notices from Amazon and Audible informing them the word "cocky" was trademarked and therefore could not be used in their titles. Now that she owns "cocky," she's dead set on forcing everyone to remove the word from their book titles…even if they were published prior to her own series or prior to the application date of her trademark.
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And it just gets worse from there. The whole exercise is basically a shakedown wrapped in plausible-sounding but utterly bogus legal jargon that would take our very own @LordSquishy a fraction of a billable hour to utterly demolish. Unfortunately, your average small-time independent writer trying to make a few bucks on the side from their hobby can't afford to hire someone like him to help them figure that out... but the good news is that Romance Writers of America can, and have. Not to mention the fact that a lot of people who had never previously heard of Faleena Hopkins now know her as "the softcore porn writer who tried to screw over her competitors with frivolous lawsuits".

So, yeah. Consider this a cautionary tale about how Intellectual Property law is not a weapon with which to bludgeon other players in the market into submission, and maybe think about paying a bit extra for a cover that's not thrown together out of cheap stock assets in the most incredibly generic fashion possible when you want to put your masterpiece up on Amazon or Smashwords.
 
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