Page 44 - AVN November 2015

EXPERT OPINION
STOP, THIEF | |By Nate Glass
Expanding Your Reach Eldorado Trading: Hablan español aqui
The United States is now the second largest Spanish-
has Spanish-speaking clientele but no bilingual staff
speaking country, second only to Mexico, with 41 million
members to help them, a huge opportunity is missed.
native Spanish speakers and an additional 11.6 million
Not only can you lose a sale and possibly customer
who are bilingual. With this, businesses today cannot
retention, but you also miss the opportunity for proper
ignore the need to cater to Spanish-speaking consumers.
product education and safety. For example, if a customer
Eldorado recognized the potential of the Spanish-
comes in looking for pills, but the store clerk cannot
speaking market and embraced it early on, becoming
communicate with them, then that customer could
one of the first adult distributors with a bilingual sales
leave the store without knowing the proper usage of the
rep. Over the years Eldorado has gradually increased its
supplement.
bilingual staff. Today, Eldorado has a dozen bilingual
Though manufacturers are recognizing the need for
staff members from the front desk all the way to the
bilingual staff, there is still a huge lack of products
warehouse. There is always someone available who can speak to the customer
solely targeted toward Spanish-speaking customers despite the huge population
in his or her language whether in house or over the phone. By having a Spanish-
and sales potential. A new brand that Eldorado backs is Atraer, the first Spanish-
speaking staff, Eldorado has been able to accommodate and serve this growing
label personal lubricant targeted toward Spanish-speaking consumers. Atraer
customer segment in their native language, making it as simple as possible to
is a quality product with colorful packaging and all Spanish labeling. By adding
achieve successful product selection, education, and international delivery.
products like Atraer, stores are creating a softer sell and easier buying experience
Not only can Spanish-speaking Eldorado customers benefit from Eldorado’s
for Spanish-speaking customers.
bilingual staff, but non-Spanish-speaking as well. With Eldorado’s commitment to
The United States has such a large Spanish-speaking population that
service, Eldorado does not want a store to lose a potential sale. If retailers have a
manufacturers, distributors, and stores alike need to take notice. By including
Spanish-speaking end customer in their store but no bilingual staffer, they can call
Spanish-speaking consumers and stores as a part in everyday business, your sales
Eldorado and the sales staff will be happy to translate for them.
and your customers will both benefit.
That brings us to the need for stores to have bilingual staff as well. If the store
This article was solicited by AVN. For more information, go to Eldorado.net.
LEGAL NEWS
(CASE STUDY continued from page 42)
The problem here is that the government is actively supplanting the tastes of
the public by having a small group of bureaucrats determine for everyone else
what they feel the public should be allowed to think about any particular brand,
company, mascot or domain name.”
The Slants argued that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is attempting to
act as a “referee of political correctness” and in doing so, they violated the First
Amendment rights of the band members. However, the three-judge panel of the
Federal Circuit disagreed with that assertion and decided there was evidence the
term ‘The Slants” is offensive to people of Asian descent. It went on to decree that
there was no free speech violation since a refusal to federally register a trademark
does not prevent the applicant from using the term, only from owning the term
with a governmentally enforced trademark protecting it.
Interestingly, Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore agreed in part but also filed a
separate, non-binding opinion that stated it may now be time to revisit the federal
trademark law’s disparagement provisions, which she admitted would probably
not hold up under current free speech laws since the U.S. Supreme Court has
previously said that even though some speech may be considered offensive, that
“does not justify its suppression.”
A parallel case now being adjudicated involves the Washington Redskins’
lawsuit against five Native Americans who convinced the PTO in June to void the
NFL team’s trademark over the term ‘Redskins’ on the grounds that the name
disparages Native Americans people. The team is currently appealing, and argues
the disparagement provision violates the First Amendment.
What adult companies and the public need to focus on is who should decide
what a company can call itself, Randazza said. “Do we really want a bunch of
unelected, unknown, mostly anonymous people from the patent office deciding
that your little league team shouldn’t be allowed to call itself the Lumberjacks
because a handful of Canadians file a complaint? What happens when a business
has a more palatable name but its initials spell out an unpopular acronym? Does it
benefit society if porn sites start naming themselves Stewart’s Playhouse instead
of a more specific term in order to get the important protections a trademark
provides—because at least from my point of view, we are better off letting adult
sites use names that identify them as adult rather than having the PTO encourage
44 | AVN.com | 11.15
them to choose names that could more easily be confused with child-safe content.”
In the aftermath of the decision, the Slants’ website stated, “We’re currently
convening to discuss next steps, we will most likely raise the issues raised by
Judge Moore and continue to discuss administrative issues in a petition for an
en banc rehearing. For example, the examining attorney applied a clearly biased
approach when determining if our name is actually disparaging: he only conducted
searches combined with other racial slurs and the word ‘derogatory.’”
Currently, the burden of proving that a trademark is disparaging rests with
the PTO, and §2(a) rejections are “relatively uncommon.” The Federal Circuit
applies a two-part test to determine if a mark is disparaging: (1) what is the
likely meaning of the matter in question, taking into account not only dictionary
definitions, but also the relationship of the matter to the other elements in the
mark, the nature of the goods or services, and the manner in which the mark is
used in the marketplace in connection with the goods and services; and (2) if that
meaning is found to refer to identifiable persons, institutions, beliefs or national
symbols, whether it may be disparaging to a substantial composite of the group.
Given that ambiguous test and the fact that the PTO or a judge are making all
of the final determinations, one can see the danger to intellectual property that is
increasing as standards of political correctness continue to evolve.
Randazza said, “It may be popular to say the Redskins should change their
name, or convenient to argue that Big Asian Tits is too offensive a term to
afford trademark protection, but anyone with even a rudimentary understanding
of Google search results can quickly see that plenty of people are looking for
and finding the team or video content they want to find by using those clearly
descriptive and identifiable brand names to find it. According to a recent report
by Dick’s Sporting Goods, the most popular NFL jerseys in Virginia and Maryland
belong to RGIII and Ryan Kerrigan—those Redskins jerseys aren’t all being
bought by accident. In fact, Kerrigan is one of just 10 non-quarterbacks with
the highest-selling jersey in at least one state. Are many of those jerseys being
bought by Native Americans? Probably not … but I don’t expect many Kerrigan
fans are buying peace pipes either and we should all equally support the right of
native tribes to trademark that term for their merchandise as well. It’s really an
important constitutional question: Should the government be allowed to condition
a benefit like intellectual property rights upon the recipient engaging in speech
that the government likes or dislikes?”