The Malle Trap: Can an Island Be a Brand?

Malle Travels, Malle Parties, Malle Drinks - every summer thousands of products are advertised in Germany with the acronym for the Spanish holiday island of Mallorca. This is how the German travel blog "Reisetiger", which has drummed on "Malle" in several contributions for the opening of the Ballermann, has done so far. His operator Holger Seyfried now but lawyer fluttered with high fees in the house.

The reason for this: An entrepreneur from Hilden near Düsseldorf, who had already been protected in 2002 by the European Trademark Office in Alicante, the colloquial name "Malle" for the holiday destination. Accordingly, companies that want to earn money with Malle, buy licenses - or even pay later damages.

Thus, a restaurateur from Essen, which has advertised, among other things, with the names "Malle Party", "Malle total" and "hands up Malle", according to a report by the station RTL per event 500 euros. For future evenings the entrepreneur from Hilden sells therefore expensive licenses, the rights to "malls" he loses only in April 2022.

Model Ballermann

An example for this could have been the couple from Lower Saxony, André and Annette Engelhardt, who had the term "Ballermann" protected in the nineties. Only last year, the Higher Regional Court of Munich confirmed the relevant trademark rights. According to their own information, the couple has managed and won over 400 processes - and thus earned quite a lot.

Also in the case of Malle, it is probably primarily about the money. "For the controversial Mallorca article, in which exactly 3 times the word 'malle' occurs, we should currently pay € 1,822.96," writes Reisetiger operator Seyfried in a blog post.

He has meanwhile turned on a lawyer who tries to erase the mark. "Place names are not protected, the mark should never have been registered," says lawyer Michael Plüschke. Accordingly, there is already an application for deletion in Alicante. When the European Trademark Office decides on this is unclear.