The US Federal Circuit has upheld a trade-mark board's decision to refuse to register a mark on the grounds that it was 'immoral ... or scandalous': In re Marsha Fox, 2012-1212 (Fed Cir, 19 December 2012). Since 1979 Fox has sold 'rooster-shaped chocolate lollipops' under the name COCK SUCKER, with a device of a crowing farmyard bird. Her primary market consists of fans of the University of South Carolina and Jacksonville State University football teams, 'both of which employ gamecocks as their athletic mascots'. This was too much for the trade-mark officials, who thought that the proposed mark also supported a 'scandalous' meaning. They rejected Fox's argument that any lewd or vulgar connotations were negated by spelling her product names as two words rather than one. Her appeals failed, in part because Fox conceded that the humour of the mark was based on the double entendre. One word versus two was 'a distinction without a difference', the association of the product with poultry not diminishing its connection with the associated vulgar term. 'The fact that something is funny does not mean it cannot be "scandalous"', said the learned (and somewhat unfortunately named) Dyk J.
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