Save
Our Aussie Icon - The Great Australian
Ugg Boot
Issue One, 4 February 2004
Dear Member,
Thank you for subscribing to our support list
for saving the ugg boot.
Much has been written about the issue in
the media and rightly so. Whilst the humble
ugg boot
may be something many of you ‘love
to hate’,
it is without any doubt an Australian icon.
In many ways, our campaign goes beyond ugg
boots.
It’s all about maintaining the right
to keep something that is Australian - just
that - Australian. It is an affront
to anyone’s intelligence that the American
company Deckers Outdoor Corporation (through
subsidiary Ugg Holding, Inc. also known as
Ugg Australia) - could so boldly claim
complete ownership to the Australian term.
But that is
precisely what they are doing and in a very
intimidating fashion. Small Australian businesses
- many of
them family-owned and run - are being
sent extremely demanding letters by Deckers’ lawyers.
Legal action is being threatened if the recipients
do not take immediate action.
In trademark law, generic terms never usually
get to the stage of being trademarked.
Sadly this has occurred and it would appear
on
face value that trademark offices have
either made
a mistake or accepted certain details to
be true which were in fact false.
Many of you have suggested that we should
simply rename the ugg boot but this fails
to meet
several of our issues. First and foremost
is the fact
that it has taken us over one hundred
years to educate consumers as to the term
ugg
boot. To
re-educate consumers would cost millions
of dollars. Secondly - because
the term is generic - it
has been simply accepted here in Australia
that no one owns it. By coming up with
a new name,
what is to stop it being trademarked
by yet another opportunist?
Unfortunately, this all gets down to
a legal contest and to fight it, it
will cost a lot
of money. Many of you have pledged
donations to
our fighting fund and for that, we
thank you. Whilst we are in the process of
organising
an appropriate method for collecting
donations, we urge those of you who
haven’t yet pledged
anything to do so by sending your pledge
amount through our contact
us form at https://www.SaveOurAussieIcon.com/contact.html.
We also urge you all to forward our
campaign email/s (that can be accessed
through
links from the page located at: https://www.saveouraussieicon.com/campaign.html)
to your friends and associates. The
greater the
number of supporters, the more likely
we
are to win. (It is simple a matter
of copying and
pasting the information into an email,
adding in your addresses and then
clicking send). Lastly, we want to make it very clear
that our issue is not with the
American people,
many of
whom are very good customers. We
appreciate all the international
support received
and thank
those who fit into this category,
for also spreading the word. Keep
up the
good work.
Please keep an eye on the website
at https://www.saveouraussieicon.com as
we update it with new information.
If
you have a website, feel free
to upload our campaign
banner and link it to our website.
Regards
The Australian sheepskin ugg
boot manufacturers and retailers |
