On 13 March 2014 a company called Aoan International Pty Ltd
filed an Australian application to register the trade mark
MH370 in class 41, the class that covers education and
entertainment services. If the combination of letters and numerals
MH370 sounds somewhat familiar to you, it's because it's
the flight number of the Malaysian Airlines plane that went missing
en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing a mere five days before the
trade mark application was filed.
The application was rejected by the Australian trade mark
authorities. Their reasoning was that the trade mark was
non-distinctive, because other parties should be entitled to do
just the sort of thing that Aoan claimed that it wanted to do,
which was to produce a TV documentary about the incident and call
it MH370. As a result of this finding, the authorities did
not need to consider a further objection that had been raised,
which was that the trade mark was scandalous. An Australian lawyer
who has written
