People — this really isn’t as complicated as is being portrayed.

If somebody registers a mark, then the way to infringe that mark is to use it so that it could reasonably be judged to confuse people as to who is selling the product. This is called “passing off”. So if I set up a burger restaurant and call it “Burger King” then patrons to my restaurant may well think it’s part of the mark holder’s chain of restaurants, thereby “taking” business from them. An a court has to determine that.

That’s easy to understand and to separate from copyright because my use of the words “Burger King” in that context will have nothing to do with the graphical presentation (the “work”) of the logo, etc. Yes, you can register a trademark in the “device” of an ugly yellow burger logo thing that accompanies the words, but that’s not the same as copyright, which grants you a monopoly on the “sweat of the brow” that went into making that logo, not how the logo is used.

Does that make sense?

Perhaps the confusion here is that words like “react” in the the “kids react…” context is plainly a common word with few normal variations (“kids express surprise…”, “kids do a double-take…” maybe). But nobody needs to worry about using that word if it isn’t likely to be “passing off”. More to the point, the reason why companies don’t pursue claims against others in this way is that they know a court would almost certainly not find that it was passing off in most cases.

Remember too that trademarks are only given in specific industry sectors. So if I create a car tyre company called “Burger King” then that would be fine. The mark holders are unlikely also to be paying to protect their mark in the auto parts industry, and that probably wouldn’t be awarded by the patents office in any case since they have rules about industry breadth.

So please, calm down. You’re conjuring up issues that don’t exist.