A Slang Word Becomes a Legal Headache
An Etsy seller in Canada is speaking out after his T-shirt listings featuring the word "bruh" were pulled from the platform. The reason: someone else holds a Canadian trademark on the word, and that person filed a complaint against his shop.
"Bruh" has been common internet and everyday slang for years, used casually among friends the way "dude" or "man" might be. But under Canadian trademark law, a word doesn't need to be original or invented to be trademarked. It just needs to be registered for use in connection with specific goods, in this case, apparel. Once that registration exists, the trademark holder can go after anyone else selling similar products using that word, even if the word is common slang everywhere else.
What Is Trademark Squatting?
The seller believes this is a case of trademark squatting: registering a common word or phrase not to build a genuine brand around it, but to use the registration as leverage against other sellers, forcing them to stop selling or pay up. It's a tactic that's popped up before with popular slang and viral phrases, since platforms like Etsy tend to remove listings quickly once a trademark complaint is filed, without necessarily digging into whether the claim is legitimate or fair.
For small sellers, that takedown can happen fast and hit hard. A shop that had "bruh" shirts as a bestseller can lose that income overnight, with little recourse beyond an appeal process that platforms don't always make easy to navigate.
Why Fighting Back Is So Hard
One legal expert weighing in on the situation pointed to the real barrier here: cost. Challenging a trademark registration in Canada, whether through the Trademarks Opposition Board or the courts, isn't cheap. Legal fees can run into the thousands of dollars, and that's before accounting for the time and uncertainty involved. For an independent Etsy seller running a small shop, that kind of expense often just isn't realistic, even if they believe the trademark shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
That imbalance is what critics of the system point to again and again. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) doesn't always catch every questionable registration before it's approved, and once a trademark is on the books, undoing it falls on whoever gets hurt by it, not the person who registered it.
The Bigger Picture for Small Sellers
This case is a reminder for anyone running a small online shop, whether on Etsy, Shopify, or elsewhere, that even the most casual, everyday words can carry legal risk if someone else has quietly registered them. It's worth doing a quick trademark search before building a product line around a catchy phrase, slang term, or meme.
For now, the seller is left weighing his options: fight the takedown, rebrand, or move on. Whatever he decides, the case has reignited a broader conversation in Canada about whether trademark law is doing enough to prevent registrations that exist mainly to squeeze out competitors rather than protect a genuine brand.
Source: CBC News
