#cockygate – Faleena Hopkins, trademark / patent troll. – Author Lesli Richardson / Tymber Dalton

Filed Under: Faleena Hopkins #cockygate trademark / patent troll

Okay, what is #cockygate? Read my first article then meet me back here. There are updates.

Ready? Here we go.

Here’s the latest #cockygate Twitter thread, with all the court docs linked. We need to be supporting Kevin and the other authors in this fight against Faleena Hopkins, trademark/patent troll. She’s filed a lawsuit now, trying to stop the trademark from being LEGALLY challenged. (Uh, if she was so dead certain her TM was VALID, why not just let the challenge proceed?)

https://twitter.com/kneupperwriter/status/1000463708168966144

Why is this important? Because authors should NOT be allowed to trademark “words.” Especially words that have been around for centuries. Had Faleena Hopkins trademarked “The Cocky Brothers” or something UNIQUE like that? Okay, that would be an acceptable use. What’s still unexplained is why Faleena Hohpkins changed her series name before trademarking the word “cocky.”

This will impact ALL creative types. I saw another great analogy: what if a painter trademarked the color blue and forced everyone else to remove it from their paintings?

Stupid, right?

That’s what we’re fighting for, and that’s why readers need to jump in, because this impacts you as well. This kind of bullshit will restrict what writers can bring you in terms of content. You don’t see Nora Roberts (JD Robb) trying to trademark the word death, do you? You don’t see Stephen King trying to trademark the word “shining,” do you? What if EL James tried to trademark BDSM? You see her doing that?

No.

Why?

Because they aren’t trademark/patent trolls trying to screw other writers over.

In the paperwork Faleena Hopkins (trademark troll) filed, FYI, she makes claims that personally offend me as a reader, because they boil down to the equivalent of “romance readers are basically as dumb as a box of rocks who only care about man-boobs.”

Page 23-24. (Link to filing HERE.) (Link to exhibits HERE.)

Basically, Faleena Hopkins is making statements that I (and many others) personally interpret to mean that she doesn’t think readers are smart enough to search by pen name, and out of all her supposed sales, she lists less than a handful of unverified social media messages from people claiming to have accidentally purchased other books they thought were hers.

*cough sock puppets cough*

You mean, books that came out BEFORE hers, like Cocky Bastard, by Penelope Ward and Vi Keeland, that came out in 2015, again for the people in back, published before Faleena’s books?

In the filings, Faleena Hopkins is also being a bully and attacking others, like author Bianca Sommerland. Bianca has fearlessly led the charge to educate authors and readers WHY this trademark suit is so dangerous to free speech, and why the trademark for the word COCKY must be cancelled.

I have news for Faleena Hopkins — don’t shit in the middle of the kitchen, and the other cooks won’t have to call you out on it.

So. What it boils down to is that an “author” who is little more than a patent/trademark troll is trying to shut down free speech.

This is why we need to STAND UP together, writers and readers, and fight this kind of bullshit. This is why we need to support the writers that Faleena Hopkins is attacking and wasting taxpayer dollars filing frivolous lawsuits against.

I mean, unless you’re okay with ONE writer trying to trademark a commonly used word and then strong-arm other writers into shelling out bucks to her to use it. Maybe I should try to trademark duke or highlander or cowboy and then start getting sue-happy.

Oh, wait, that’s right. I’M NOT AN ASSHOLE.

All Faleena Hopkins had to do was use the trademark process PROPERLY. All she had to do was trademark her series name, NOT a common word. (With our current government it’s no shocker this slipped through, quite honestly, but it never should have been approved in the first place.)

In the wake of this, there are other writers who’ve tried similar bullshit, like trademarking “forever” (it was withdrawn) among others. So now it feels like we’re playing Whack-A-Mole or something.

All because a writer who very few people had even HEARD of before all this bullshit, who’s only been a writer for a couple of years, decided she wanted to try to fuck other writers over. And as a reader, it pisses me off that she disses this genre the way she does. It’s obvious all she cares about is making money, not telling good stories and respecting her readers.

There is a Twitter bot you can follow that posts USPTO filings to alert you what’s trying to be trademarked so they can be challenged ahead of actually being approved.

Tweets by cockybot

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#cockygate – Faleena Hopkins, trademark / patent troll.

Tagged on: #cockygate #writerbeware #writerfail cocky Faleena Hopkins patent troll trademark troll what NOT to do as a writer

One thought on “#cockygate – Faleena Hopkins, trademark / patent troll.”

SPACE SNARK™
May 27, 2018 at 6:28 pm

I’m baffled by the litigious lady’s astonishing assumption that her fans are unable to comprehend six letter words, to wit, “Faleena” and to infer that if the words “by Faleena Hopkins” are missing from the front cover of the book, any book with another author’s name on it might still be part of her series.
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