Peter Frase

Complementing my last post, here’s a story about the twisted ideology that now surrounds intellectual property, where IP is considered not just as utilitarian necessity, but as some kind of inherent natural right. In the most absurd form, it is seen as a moral responsibility for creators to zealously defend any IP they can get their hands on, and maximize whatever amount of money they can squeeze out of it.

This article is about our trendy hot sauce of the moment, Sriracha. Specifically, it is about the fact that while the hot sauce in question is strongly associated with a particular product made by Huy Fong foods, the Sriracha name itself is not trademarked. As a result, everyone from your local twee sauce artisan to Heinz and Tabasco is now jumping in with their own Sriracha.

None of this seems to much bother Huy Fong’s founder, David Tran. But boy does it bother all the people that look at this scenario and see a bunch of juicy lawsuits!

The author of the LA Times article calls it a “glaring omission” not to trademark the word.

“In my mind, it’s a major misstep,” says the president of a food marketing consultancy.

Even his competitors are baffled. “We spend enormous time protecting the word ‘Tabasco’ so that we don’t have exactly this problem,” says the CEO of a rival hot sauce company that’s now going into the Sriracha market. “Why Mr. Tran did not do that, I don’t know.”

An IP lawyer laments: “The ship has probably sailed on this, which is unfortunate because they’ve clearly added something to American cuisine that wasn’t there before.”

That David Tran has added something to American cuisine is hard to dispute. But Tran also has a successful, growing business that has most likely made him very rich. One which he has said, on numerous occasions, he deliberately does not scale up as much as he could, in order to maintain the quality of his product and control the sources of his peppers.

So for whom is it so “unfortunate” that he doesn’t spend his life in constant litigation against anyone who dares make a Thai-style hot sauce and name it after a city in Thailand? Tran himself gives the answer. “We have lawyers come and say ‘I can represent you and sue’ and I say ‘No. Let them do it.'”