Bullying tactics backfire in battle of the geeks

Best Buy store. Photo / Wikimedia

Be careful who you call a "geek". It might get you sued.

The United States retailer Best Buy, which is renowned in roughly equal measure for selling cheap electronics and providing patchy customer service, is claiming legal ownership of the well-worn term of abuse.

Lawyers for the firm, which owns 950 stores in the US, have pursued at least a dozen individuals and firms which have intruded on what it believes are its exclusive global rights to refer to employees as "geeks".

Its victims have ranged from rival firms who offer services such as "Speak to a Geek" and "Rent a Geek", to a priest who decorated his Volkswagen Beetle with the phrase "God Squad". Best Buy said that the priest's slogan was in a similar font to the "Geek Squad" logo used by its technical support staff.

The policy shows the zeal with which US corporations occasionally seek to assert their rights to trademark a well-worn word or phrase. And it showcases the extent to which the word "geek" has, in the Mark Zuckerberg era, come to symbolise a mixture of steely competence, visionary talent, and stratospheric commercial success.

Best Buy's latest effort to assert rights over geekdom backfired, however, when a comically aggressive cease-and-desist letter sent to Newegg, an internet firm which also sells discounted electrical goods, was published on the rival's Facebook page.

In the letter, Best Buy complained that Newegg's corporate slogan "Geek on!" was an infringement of its trademark in the term "Geek Squad". The firm demanded Newegg "promptly and permanently" stop running an ad which satirises poor customer service at a supposedly generic high-street store.

As the disputed Newegg commercial shows "a blue-shirted salesperson in a store with a similar layout/colour scheme to Best Buy", the letter alleged it was defamatory.

"The fake Best Buy employee is depicted as being slovenly and uninformed about computer products," it complained.

Newegg denied its ad was meant to "focus on any particular retailer".

The company eventually agreed to run a disclaimer which claimed it was "solely intended to parody business establishments that provide poor customer service (but none in particular)".

- INDEPENDENT