On December 3, 2007, Fark.com (NSFW) filed an application to trademark “Not Safe For Work,” pertaining to the following:
(1) “Entertainment Services namely providing a website featuring photographic, audio, video and prose presentations featuring comedic captions regarding current events and online discussions and/or reviews of web materials of an adult nature”
(2) “Entertainment services, namely, providing a web site featuring musical performances, musical videos, related film clips, photographs, and other multimedia materials”
(3) “Entertainment services, namely, providing on-line reviews of photogrpahs and /or web postings of an adult nature” For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase (or NSFW), sites use this tag for links that go to places that are, well, not work safe. A spin through Fark finds this on everything (usually photos or videos), including mother-daughter sex tag-team photos, strange asian schoolgirl/animal copulation, and body-part combat pics (thank you seach engines!).
Fark’s first date of use in commerce is claimed to be June 7, 2000. While Fark may have been around back in 2000 (http://web.archive.org/web/20000815065407/http://www.fark.com/) it is doubtful that they used this phrase then.
Barriers to approval will be: Proving date of first use, Genericide of the term (or it being highly descriptive), and much, much third party use.
Filed under: Trademark
