Our First Draft piece on Saturday failed to include the fact that the RACGP has a trademark protection on the letters ‘FRACGP’.
Our First Draft piece on Saturday about the RACGP trying to hold onto members (by saying that if GPs cancelled their membership, they couldn’t use their fellowship letters) failed to include the fact that the RACGP has a trademark protection on the letters ‘FRACGP’.
The Medical Republic applied for the business name ‘FRACGP’, a URL and copyright protection, all of which were given the green light except copyright protection, which takes a while. A reader pointed out on the weekend that the RACGP has trademark protection, which we didn’t think about, but really should have.
The RACGP does have trademark protection on the letters FRACGP.
Without acknowledging that the RACGP had trademark protection on the letters in the original story, one part of the story isn’t accurate.
The original story implied that the college hadn’t gone to much trouble if they didn’t own the business name, URL and copyright. That is not accurate.
A trademark is the most important protection probably the college could have applied for and by having it, most of the rest would be protected anyway.
We should have checked for trademark protection as well in the original story and included that in the story. For this, we apologise to the RACGP.
Clearly the RACGP had gone to some lengths to protect the brand, which was not conveyed in the original piece. We have written a note at the beginning of the story now to point this out, apologised in the story and corrected the story accordingly.
The college has not contacted us at all at this stage about this issue, so this apology is not in response to any complaint by it.
If you haven’t read the story but would like to, or you wish to check the corrected story, it is HERE.
Our more perceptive readers will have noticed that based on the trademark protection that the RACGP has in place, we probably now won’t be able to send out any of our merchandise mugs, with Fearless Reporting And Commentary on General Practice (FRACGP) on them. We had quite a few enquiries. We are going to check this week to see if the college will let us off in the spirit things, but, in fairness, if I were them I probably wouldn’t.
Even more perceptive readers might wonder if COFFIN had trademarked their design and logo as well, which we shamelessly stole for the design and logo of our mug. Unsurprisingly, they had not trademarked the logo, but I asked the drummer if it was OK, and he laughed.
Jeremy Knibbs
Publisher
