File this one under the “you have to got to be kidding me” category. Well actually not… this is Bluehole aka Krafton’s cracked group of executives with their heads up their proverbial ass. As I have covered before, Bluehole turned to this whole intellectual property thing when the CEO (Won-Hee Park) of what was then known as Bluehole Ginno (now PUBG Corp), tried to sell the idea of other companies licensing the Devilian IP (half human/half devil form) as a last ditch effort to make the Devilian franchise relevant (since PC and mobile MMO were losing traction in their respective markets).
PUBG Corp CEO Chang-Han Kim was second in command (co-founder) and replaced Park when Bluehole Ginno was renamed to PUBG Corp. So he is continuing with these attempts to find some form of intellectual property for PUBG via another (stupid) lawsuit (the first was filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Epic Games in South Korea regarding Fortnite which they quickly dropped a few weeks later).
PUBG Corporation’s original trademark claim for the Chinese translated equivalent of “Chicken Dinner” ended up being rejected by the countries National Intellectual Property Administration so they are appealing that decision by filing this lawsuit against that agency. Yes, these folks are off their rockers.
In english language circles, the phrase “winner winner chicken dinner” has been around LONG before PUBG was ever in existence and that is obviously why PUBG Corp isn’t bothering trying to trademark it in english speaking countries. Translated equivalents (especially in a large country like China) seems to be their corporate legals “brilliant” (read idiotic) idea of finding some sort of intellectual property they can tie to the PUBG franchise.
Regardless, it’s a generic term (as in actually describing an actual chicken dinner) regardless of language and just like their weak copyright claims against Epic Games, any attempts to trademark a translated equivalent of “winner winner chicken dinner” wouldn’t even fly. I’m actually waiting for these folks to try to trademark the frying pan…
