Duff Beer Can Views

General Goods

Since 2006, Rodrigo Contreras, from Guadalajara, Mexico is setting up a business with the purpose of selling Duff beer. He managed to register the Duff trademark in Mexico, as well as the domain name DuffDeMexico.com. Contreras designed the bottle to be identical to the one portrayed on The Simpsons. The bottle can be seen at his website. The beer is currently available at a few bars, but Contreras has stated his intention of selling it at convenience stores and even exporting it to the United States.[6]

This case has been featured on several Mexican newspapers and magazines, but most of them focus on the novelty the beer represents, rather than the legal implications of it. The Duff trademark was not registered in Mexico before Contreras registered it; however, Mexican intellectual property law recognizes the concept of brand notoriety , which states that if any brand is well-known by a specific section of the consumers or the industry due to the commercial activities and/or advertisement done by its owners, they have the right to claim the ownership of the trademark.[7] What seems to be a pirated Duff beer produced by Contreras is about to be released in Colombia. According to its website, he may already have a local trademark over Duff , since it claims that another Duff pirate was jailed in Bogotá.[8]

The word duff is common English slang for useless or broken (it can also mean pregnant, in the phrase up the duff ). Like many other countries, discerning beer-drinkers often characterize popular domestic brews in a pejorative way (American criticize Budweiser, Australians discount Fosters, Victoria Bitter et cetera) as being mass-market swill. Clearly, the character of Homer represents the typical mindless drone who would drink whatever beer was marketed most heavily, regardless of quality, as satire of undiscriminating beer drinkers who routinely purchase popular (read: heavily advertised) beer.

As reported on the T.V. show Inside Edition, there was a scam in 2004 where an Australian woman was sold a Duff beer similar to the one on The Simpsons (in which the can had the same logo as the can on the show). She went to court to sue the person who sold it to her but the case was thrown out by the judge a few days later.