Is ‘Courier’ a trademark?

Well, yes it is, as the Ford Motor Company will happily attest. But I’m more interested in this claim:

‘Courier’ is a trademark of The Monotype Corporation registered in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and may be registered in other jurisdictions

That’s from MyFonts Linotype Courier page, which is notable as there’s no such claim on its Monotype Courier, Adobe Courier or ParaType Courier pages. The claim as written above is rather... ambiguous. One would be forgiven for thinking that ‘Courier’ has been registered as a Trademark at the USPTO – but it hasn’t. ‘Monotype Corporation’ is registered, but that’s a rather different reading of the sentence.

Why is a Monotype Trademark claim written on the Linotype page of the MyFonts site published by Bitstream? It is interesting to note that since 2006 Linotype’s fonts have belonged to Monotype, who also acquired Bitstream’s font business in March 2012. So that’s a Monotype font on a Monotype website. It’s a bit rich therefore that the link to that page carries the Registered Trademark symbol – you cannot use that symbol if the Trademark is not registered:

There’s more – Microsoft’s Courier New Opentype font carries this:

Courier™ Trademark of The Monotype Corporation plc registered in certain countries.

This is earlier and has the correct Trademark symbol at least, but also uses that… yeah let’s stick with “ambiguous” wording regarding registration. But for how long have Monotype been claiming that they have a Trademark over what every other font foundry regards as a generic name?

IBM were responsible for popularising the original Courier, and having not sought to protect it in any way it soon became ubiquitous. It has been recreated in every font medium since – photomechanical, daisywheel, golfball, 9-pin dot matrix, 24-pin dot matrix, laser printers driven by PCL, HPGL, and then by Postscript where Adobe included it as one of the standard 35 fonts. All this time it was “Courier”, no ™ and definitely no ®.

Adobe’s Type1 Postscript fonts all carry copyright and trademark warnings. Adobe’s Helvetica Postscript font carries the notice “Helvetica is a trademark of Linotype-Hell AG and/or its subsidiaries”, and its Times-Roman Postscript font says “Times is a Trademark of Linotype-Hell AG”, but their Courier Postscript font has no trademark notice at all. The Postscript Language Reference Manual cites the trademarks of every font name mentioned in its 750+ pages, except ‘Courier’.

‘Courier’ fonts are available from half a dozen foundries from the MyFonts site alone, and other suppliers are available. ParaType’s Courier dates from 1990 and Adobe’s from 1989, so what is the basis of Monotype’s claim? I was so puzzled by this I wrote to MyFonts who cited the Wikipedia page where the claim is repeated and added:

I'm not an expert on this rather complex subject and the discussion has already reached the limits of my knowledge.

Which is very polite.

So is ‘Courier’ a Trademark? I don’t think so. Adobe don’t think so. ParaType don’t think so. Monotype do think so, as do Monotype (Linotype), and Monotype (MyFonts). The Wikipedia claim was added by Jacob Poons (who seems to have left Wikipedia for the same reasons I did) in relation to ‘Courier New’ so is most likely to have come from the OpenType claim above.

In other words, the basis for Monotype “owning the Trademark” on ‘Courier’ appears to be that they said they did in the ‘Courier New’ font they produced for Microsoft.

Right, I’m off to add some outrageous claims to the metadata of some of my fonts.