My Opinion on the Ugly Urban Homesteading Trademark

On my own path to freedom I am going to start my urban homestead this spring; a little homestead in the city, per se. Oh wait…I can DO it, I just can’t talk about without giving credit to The Dervaes Institute.

Many of you have probably heard the news about the Dervaes family of Pasadena, California, and their recent (started in 2008) trademark of certain terms like urban homestead or urban homesteading. This has frustrated the urban homesteading community and has a lot of people wondering what they can say and what they can't. I don't offer any advice really, this is after all, just my opinion, and quite honestly, a rant that has been brewing for the past 48 hours. 

Their registered trademark will not stand a chance in court, if it ends up being challenged. ( Here is a petition to challenge the trademark )You can not lay claim to an idea that started prior to your use of it or implementation of it.

Can I trademark the term “homeschool” or “homeschooling”? I do not have exclusive rights to that term. I did not “coin” it nor was I the first one to implement the idea of homeschooling in my own life.

I am disappointed in the Dervaes family. In casting off the bonds of corporate America, they became a corporation themselves.

As for using the terms “urban homestead” or “urban homesteading” and having to put a big fat ™ after each of those generic terms used by people all over the globe, I will not do it. Nor will I put a big fat ™ after the word Meijer or Blackberry when making reference to them. Will those trademarked companies hunt me down and force me to give them credit for using their “name”…no, I really doubt it.

I think the following letter from the Institute of Urban Homesteading to its students (after receiving one of the “letters” from the Dervaes family, is great. It proves that the Dervaes family is in fact sending out those “letters”.  Response letter from the Institute of Urban Homesteading

What it boils down to is this: Registering a trademark is not the issue. There are many trademarked phrases or words (that the Dervaes family points out here Path to Freedom- "The original urban homesteaders") that we as a community of “simple living-backyard garden folk” use every day: “hobby farm”, “square foot gardening”, and “gardener”, to name just a few. The issue is not whether or not these terms are trademarked, the issue is whether or not the “owners” of those trademarks are going to hunt down every organization in the nation and put them in a legal headlock to try and stop everyone from using “THEIR” word. It seems counterproductive to the urban homesteading movement itself. If I want to have a little farm and name it Monica’s Hobby Farm are the owners of the magazine “Hobby Farm” going to care? I don’t know, maybe they would…but I highly doubt it.

The Dervaes corporation wants us to link back to them every time we use the phrase urban homestead because they started the concept and were the "first" to implement it…sorry to tell them, but urban homesteading was in my vocabulary long before I happened upon their site a year ago.

With that said…I am really looking forward to getting my chickens and planting my garden this year. I hope to one day have an urban homestead of my own…or should I say non-rural yard garden. Maybe I’ll move out to the country and trademark the word “Farm”.

If I seem a little perturbed…I am. I shall move on, I shall continue on my path to freedom and venture into my own urban homesteading adventure, but some things are just not right. 

For the record- the path to freedom, the original path to freedom, is Yahshua our Messiah, the Word of Yahweh, and the Spirit of Truth.  So now, every time those words are used..."path to freedom" do we have to link back to The Dervaes Institute?

One more thing- The Dervaes family states that they wanted to trademark the aforementioned terms to keep it out of the hands of greedy corporate giants, and for that, I commend them. What happened after is what most people have an issue with. They became the greedy corporate giant. 

“ We didn’t come up the name but we came up with the application.... We didn’t mean to bully anyone. These marks are what people do to make sure no one infringes on their ideas – they’re to give people who develop something protection. That’s why people like Apple and Nike do it. We did what other normal people would have done.” - Jules Dervaes

(You came up with the application? I think they believe they are the only urban homesteaders in the world. What else could you possibly mean by that? And for the record...Nike ain't normal people. They have possibly one of the worst enslavement, er...manufacturing practices in the world.)

Trademark the phrase, then let others use it just as they have been all along. Then, IF some corporation that does not have a clue about urban homesteading comes along and uses the phrase to sell one of their over-priced products made in China, just to bank on the name, THEN send one of those letters. THEN you can try to protect it. But, don't try to protect it from the people that are trying to move it forward and make it an every day common term, and more than that, a common implementation.