Craft Brewing Company

Within the craft beer industry, trademarks associated with a brewery, a brewery’s taproom, or a beer produced by the brewery indicate a source of the beer or service, which allow beer consumers to associate each brewery with a quality of their beer or service based on past experiences. Thus, trademarks serve to increase the quality of breweries’ beer and services as they strive to maintain a favorable reputation among consumers, and to reduce search and transaction costs for the consumers when making decisions on which type of beer to purchase and imbibe. As the craft beer industry continues to rapidly grow, the availability of unique trademarks is inversely waning, which has increasingly led to trademark duplication and dispute among breweries.
Breweries have used many vehicles to handle trademark disputes including various types of agreements, social media campaigns, inter partes trademark proceedings, and litigation. Within the past few years, craft brewers and intellectual property lawyers alike have noticed greater tension over trademark use in the craft beer industry causing more disputes to bypass efforts to reach an amicable agreement and head straight to the courtroom. Reasons for this trend towards litigation …show more content…
Therefore, structuring the organization in a way that will promote participation may be crucial to its success. One such structure may be to pair up with a currently existing, well-respected trade group, such as the Brewer’s Association, that is already dedicated to unifying craft brewers. If high membership from the industry can be achieved, then the costs of trademark right enforcement can be reduced through implementation of both preventative mechanisms, such as search tools and monitoring features, and cost and time effective enforcement mechanisms, such as mandatory