THE TERM "WORSHIP LEADER" TRADEMARKED...

 

Another absurdity that evangelicals get themselves into - ed.We read in Christianity Today the following news about the worldliness of evangelical churches and groups:

Worship Leader Probs was a meme account and podcast dedicated to the challenges of music ministry, but last week its creators revealed that they’ve lost social media pages and had to censor their brand due to a company claiming ownership to “two out of the three words” in their original name. That company is Authentic Media, which runs a church resource called Worship Leader, once a print magazine and now available online. Authentic Media holds the trademark for “worship leader” and last year publicly stated that it planned “to continue to defend our trademark, as we have for decades." The dispute between Worship Leader and Worship Leader Probs dates back to October 2022, when Authentic Media explained its concerns about the name during a phone call with the creators of the meme account. According to Joshua Swanson, editor-in-chief of Worship Leader and managing partner at Authentic Media, the company “woke up to the fact that people were using our brand,” and in 2022, he and others at Authentic Media became particularly concerned about brand confusion with Worship Leader Probs. “It became a material issue for us. Our mission and their mission do not align,” Swanson told CT. “It became a major conflict. We would be at events, and people thought we were them and they were us.” The phone call last fall did not resolve things, and after months at an impasse, Authentic Media began reporting Worship Leader Probs’ social media accounts for trademark infringement in February 2023.

We wonder what happened to the apostolic admonition to believers NOT to take each other to court (I Cor. 6.1-8)!  The company that has ownership of this term, gives their reason for taking down any site that uses their term:

Here’s a situation that would be very similar in nature to a business encountering the use of its trademark by another business. If you woke up and found someone building a house on your property, in your backyard, what would you do? You would tell them to stop and ask them to leave because they don’t own the property. You do. A trademark is a piece of property. Here’s a definition: “TRADEMARK; a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company or product.” The word “legally” implies that the trademark is now a piece of property owned by a business and we’ve seen that to be true through some epic litigation battles over trademarks that include some of the biggest companies in the world.Instagram v LitterGram Apple Corps (Beatles) v Apple Computer Starbucks v Sambucks. In fact, our own business has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on our trademark through the purchase of “Worship Leader” from Maranatha! Music. See below for our rich and historic lineage. Also, through the ongoing legal fees necessary to defend our trademark for the decades that we’ve owned it. We have “invested” in our trademarks and so we are compelled to continue to defend all of them and ensure that our investments are protected. Another analogy that may help our readers better understand why it’s important for us to defend our trademark is this; if Compassion International, a business that we love and that has a very specific mission of giving hope to children in poverty, had another business create a social media profile like @CompassionInternationalKids, do you think they would have a problem with that? Wouldn’t that name, being so similar to Compassion’s brand name, be potentially perceived as being a part of Compassion? Like Compassion, Worship Leader has a specific mission we feel the Lord has given to us and if another company came along and used our name to do anything close to our mission, but was in fact a completely different business, we would consider that a challenge to the legitimacy of our brand. We feel strongly that Worship Leaders’ mission of empowering the church to build a lifestyle of worship is worth defending, therefore we will continue to defend our trademarks to ensure that there is no brand confusion and that the words “Worship Leader” are synonymous with our mission. This analogy applies to any church or business out there. @CapitalRecordsJokes or @WheatonCollegeFunnies – not cool and a clear trademark violation that those companies would defend against in order to ensure there’s no brand confusion and no way that potential customers would think that @WheatonCollegeFunnies is a derivative account affiliated with Wheaton College. So, owning and managing our trademark is part of stewarding the mission that God has laid on our business, and we take that very seriously.

This is a common question as trademark violators often report that “Worship Leader took down my social account.” Well, that’s not true. We don’t have that much influence and that’s not our way of operating. We first attempt to reach out to any new business that has used our trademark and ask them to change their name. Sometimes we do that through email or phone calls, other times through a more formal document called a Cease and Desist, but we never do anything publically or try and shame any business that is violating trademark law. A lot of new businesses just don’t understand how trademark law works and our goal is to quickly identify when a new business has violated any of our trademarks and notify them so they don’t get too far along in their business before realizing that they need to change their name. Often times we get busy on other projects and it takes us a while to notify a business of their trademark infringement. Most recently, with the passing of our founder and the new partnership that we formed, we’ve been a bit behind, but we’re now getting caught up and plan to continue to defend our trademark, as we have for decades. Regarding social networks, we have no control over their actions as they have their own terms of service that users must abide by, but due to the legal importance of a trademark, they all have trademark infringement claims departments where businesses can submit documentation proving ownership of a trademark and report accounts that violate a trademark. We have submitted documentation to social networks before when we’ve found businesses to be unresponsive to our request to stop using our property in the form of our trademark. But, the important point here is that we aren’t determining whether or not there is a trademark violation. We are reporting that we feel there is one. Social networks, like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc., determine for themselves based on the evidence we provide whether or not a user account or a piece of content violates a trademark.

The group "Worship Leader Probs" lost substantially due to the actions of "Worship Leader":

Before losing its accounts, Worship Leader Probs had 15,000 followers on Facebook and 45,000 followers on TikTok. Its YouTube page has also been taken down. On Instagram, where it has the largest following—133,000—Tabor has been able to rebrand and keep the account as “Worship Probs,” with a Band-Aid over the L in its WLP logo. What started as an anonymous meme-sharing account has grown into a community and resource for worship leaders looking for inspiration and commiseration. Its growth from a silly diversion into a full-fledged ministry—running it has become creator Brian Tabor’s full-time job—likely led to the conflict with Worship Leader. Tabor started Worship Leader Probs in 2016 and joked about the scenarios worship leaders know all too well: tech crises, unrehearsed musicians, and holiday exhaustion. “It started to catch on and grow. People started to ask ‘Who are you? How do you know what I’m dealing with today?’” said Tabor, who has served as a worship pastor in Indianapolis since 1993.

 This is what happens when Christianity is turned into a "brand".  In I Corinthians 6, we are even instructed to allow ourselves to be "defrauded".  Yet then Christian groups follow the business practices of the world, they become like the world. What is most ironic about this event is that the term "worship leader" is not even a scriptural term!  We shall let the Arminians fight among themselves over their man-made inventions.