fuck.uk.com

Places and brands

Fuck on the map and in the shops

Some places have the word in their name by accident of history. Some companies have put it there on purpose. Both have kept trademark examiners and sign-makers busy.

Fucking, Austria

The village of Fucking, in Upper Austria near the German border, was named after a 6th-century Bavarian nobleman called Focko and had been spelled that way since at least 1070. It had about a hundred inhabitants and, from the 1990s, a serious problem with English-speaking tourists stealing its road signs, which were eventually set in concrete. Residents voted against a change in 2004; on 1 January 2021 the village became Fugging. There is another Fugging, in Lower Austria, which had made the same change in 1836 and objected to sharing the name. Villages called Fucking and Fuckingen still appear on old maps of Bavaria.

Other places

Fucking Hell

In 2010 the EU trademark office (then OHIM) allowed the registration of "Fucking Hell" as a trademark for beer and clothing, reasoning that Fucking was a place and Hell is a Bavarian word for pale lager, so the mark merely described a pale beer from Fucking. The village had no brewery. The beer was brewed elsewhere and sold on the name, as intended.

FCUK

The British clothing retailer French Connection began using the initials FCUK, from "French Connection United Kingdom", in 1991 and built a whole marketing campaign on them from 1997 ("fcuk fashion", "fcuk advertising"). The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a series of complaints and in 2001 required the company to submit all its posters for pre-vetting; a 2006 application to have the trademark declared invalid as contrary to public morality failed, though the hearing officer was unimpressed. The letters made the company famous and are still on the shopfronts.

FUCT and the US Supreme Court

Erik Brunetti's streetwear brand FUCT (he says it stands for "Friends U Can't Trust") was refused a US trademark under a rule against "immoral or scandalous" marks. In Iancu v. Brunetti (2019) the Supreme Court struck the rule down as viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment, and the mark was registered. The decision opened the door to a queue of applications that the Patent Office had been refusing for a century.

Fack Ju Göhte

The German film comedy Fack Ju Göhte (2013; the spelling is deliberate) was refused an EU trademark as contrary to public morality. In 2020 the Court of Justice of the European Union overturned the refusal, noting that the film had been seen by millions of Germans without apparent moral injury and that the office had to consider how German-speaking audiences actually perceived the phrase, not how an English-speaking examiner did.

Other brands