Is This A Threat or a Joke?

Is this comment on a post I made last week yes, yes, yes, no crises, a joke, a threat or just a shameless attempt to encourage traffic to a website?

I just ran across an article you wrote on Homepaddock entitled Yes, Yes, Yes, No Crisis, http://homepaddock.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/yes-yes-yes-no-crisis/, and I would like to raise an issue that is of concern to Selling Power magazine, which is the use of our trademark.

The word “Selling Power” is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for sales effectiveness. For example, your article states: “The other flaw is that the companies are businesses which need to make profits which they do by selling power.” We do not condone such uses of our trademark.

As a practical matter, when you describe sales effectiveness, there are a wide range of terms available such as: sales excellence, sales savvy, sales mastery, sales acumen, sales efficiency, and many more.

The reason for this letter is to educate writers like yourself that we want to protect our trademark, since we don’t want to risk Selling Power being declared by the courts a generic word. Therefore we ask you not to use Selling Power as a phrase since it is our legal trademark.

We would like to receive a written acknowledgment of this letter stating that you will in the future identify Selling Power as a trademark if you should write about our magazine, and not use Selling Power as a phrase. If we do not hear from you, we will need to take further action.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

That the post was about electricity not sales seems to have escaped the writer as is the fact you can’t trademark or copyright random words and phrases in common usage.