The rise of branding businesses around Corona/Covid

Trademarks, domain registrations and naming your company with Covid continue to move forward.

Trademarks filed for things like CovidLivesMatter, (the .com was actually registered in March 2020).

ICLG.com published an article that gives a deep dive to all 3 components in one place.

The author noted a lot of legal from around the world are condemning these trademark registrations.

From the article:

These speculative trademark filings aiming to capitalize on the coronavirus outbreak that the world is facing currently are being perceived negatively by various legal organisations across the globe.

Even law firms in the United States have strongly condemned this action by the legal professionals calling the filings a scheme to get rich fast that often fails.

The trend in filings for “corona” and “COVID” pertaining to the novel coronavirus are being attributed to applicants who believe that the “first to file” are the first to exploit This opinion by legal organisations is also fuelled by the description of the filings such as, “#COVIDLIVESMATTER” to be used on clothing articles; “CORONA COCKTAIL” filed in the class for beverages; or the Korean filing of “Corona Killer” with a device which is an aesthetic rendition of the coronavirus.

A cumulative list of the total number of Trademark filings in each country are the following – 

S.No.	Country	Number of Trademarks filed
1.	India	7
2.	Europe	8
3.	USA	86
4.	Canada	1
5.	Germany	5
6.	Spain	7
7.	France	2
8.	Korea	3
9.	Singapore	1
10.	New Zealand	3
11.	Australia	2
Total – 125

Personally I think the branding is not wise but especially when it comes to Corona, first off there is the well known Beer brand, Corona. Secondly there are many coronaviruses. Covid-19 is what this pandemic is all about.