OSHO International Foundation Zurich (the legal holder of trademarks and copyrights related to OSHO) have lost the trademark of the word “OSHO” as related to meditations and related usages. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board found that “the term OSHO is generic for the meditations devised by the mystic OSHO and the meditation and religious movement arising therefrom. As a result defendant [OIF] cannot foreclose others from utilizing the term OSHO to describe their own goods and services based upon such meditations and movements.”

The decision effects 13 different trademarks or usages of the word OSHO. It is the result of an opposition lodged by OSHO Friends International against OSHO International Foundation (OFI v OIF). OFI also accused OIF of committing fraud by registering the trademarks,
but this was not upheld by the courts decision.

The opposition case was started in November 2000 after OIF had filed for the trademark to OSHO Active Meditations (they had previously filed for trademarks starting in April 1999). A full time line is available here. The full decision from the court is available from the United States Patent and Trademark Office

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FROM USPTO site:
“DECISION: plaintiff’s petition to cancel is hereby granted on the ground of genericness as to Registration Nos. 1815840, 2180173 and 2174607. Plaintiff’s petition to cancel is further granted on the ground of mere descriptiveness as to Registration No. 2322901. Accordingly, these registrations will be cancelled in due course.

Plaintiff’s oppositions to the registration of application Serial Nos. 75834601; 76159554; 76159553; 76060676; 75683097; 76210213; 76158894; 76158895; and 76158893 are sustained on the ground of mere descriptiveness.

Here are the trademarks effected:
1) OSHO ACTIVE MEDITATIONS in application serial No. 75834601.
2) OSHO ZEN TAROT, Application Serial No. 76159554
3) OSHO TRANSFORMATION TAROT, App Ser No 76159553
4) OSHO KUNDALINI MEDITATION, App Ser No 76060676
5) OSHO App Ser No 75683097
6) OSHO NADABRAHMA MEDITATION App Ser No 76210213
7) OSHO MEDITATION RESORT App Ser No 76158894
OSHO MULTIVERSITY App Ser No 76158895
9) OSHO TIMES App Ser No 76158893
10) OSHO REBALANCING App Ser No 2322901

The case involved testimony from many sannyasins, in particular from OSHO Deepta (Yogananda, Sangeet, Krishna Priya, Sudhasadan) in California, OSHO Viha and OSHOWorld.com.

OSHOWorld has written a beautiful letter:

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A great day… ­ below messages from OSHO World and OSHO VIHA….

Beloveds of OSHO

As i write this my heart is so fill…..of what cannot say…of gratitude, of love, of rememberance of Him, of…. Feels impossible to write.

CONGRATULATIONS to all of you… His lovers….we won!

OSHO is now… freely available to all His lovers.

Message from our attorneys to whom we will always be filled with gratitude.

“We won! We won! We won! Congratulations to all of you!”

USPTO granted our petitions filed to cancel and granted our oppositions to all of OIF’s OSHO trademark registrations and applications. It is a beautiful opinion.

We succeeded in simplifying the lengthy and complex record sufficiently so the Board obviously was able to grasp what was going on in this case.

The following are some of the more noteworthy statements by the Board.

“Based upon the testimony and evidence of record, we find that the primary significance of OSHO is as a religious or meditative movement, and not as a source identifier for goods or services.”

“…this term is generic and should be freely available for use by competitors. … As a result, defendant cannot appropriate the term OSHO to identify the source of its goods and services related to such teachings.”

The Board concluded: “Based upon the foregoing, we find the term OSHO is generic for the meditations devised by the mystic OSHO and the meditative and religious movement arising therefrom. As a result, defendant cannot foreclose others from utilizing the term OSHO to
describe their own goods and services based upon such meditations and movements.”

The Board sustained our action based on the grounds of genericness and/or the term being merely descriptive. It said that it therefore did not feel it was necessary to reach the other issues.

It is a beautiful decision and a great victory in a team effort. On a personal note, I congratulate all of His lovers for this fabulous result and thank you for all of your efforts in this cause.

Thank you thank you thank you……
Let us now freely go forward to let Him do His work….

LOVE U all His Lovers.

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And the following letter from Sangeet (one of the legal representatives involved):

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Beloveds,

There was a big win for religiousness over religion in the US today. Obama is being sworn in and OSHO is free for all to use: it’s a happy New Year indeed.

The US trademark board released it’s decision in the OSHO case today, after 10 years of litigation. The opinion was very strongly worded and unanimous. The board ruled that “OSHO” is used to refer to meditations and the movement that arose around the teachings of the person OSHO. It isn’t a brand of products produced by OSHO International Foundation
in Zurich.

This means that “OSHO” must be available for all OSHO’s people to use to describe what they’re doing. OIF cannot keep others from using OSHO. Every trademark challenged by OSHO Friends was canceled or denied.

This is the best possible decision we could have hoped for. It steps over all the arguments about who owned what trademarks and whether anyone licensed anyone else. In essence, this decision simply says that there is no trademark. Since the name “OSHO” means a certain
approach to meditation and a whole movement, it can’t be a trademark for anyone, ever.

Many thanks to everyone who helped with this, who stood up and were counted. All the witnesses that OSHO Friends called were cited in the footnotes of the decision, but there were particular quotes from the testimony of Dhanyam (Rosansky), Krishna Priya (Hemenway), and Maniko (Dadigan). Telling the truth does have power!

I’m attaching the decision. Please pass this great news on to anyone on your address list who might like to celebrate.

Much love,
Sangeet

Source : Sannyasworld.com

Beloveds,

There was a big win for religiousness over religion in the US today. Obama is being sworn in and OSHO is free for all to use: it’s a happy New Year indeed.

The US trademark board released it’s decision in the OSHO case today, after 10 years of litigation. The opinion was very strongly worded and unanimous. The board ruled that “OSHO” is used to refer to meditations and the movement that arose around the teachings of the person OSHO. It isn’t a brand of products produced by OSHO International Foundation
in Zurich.

This means that “OSHO” must be available for all OSHO’s people to use to describe what they’re doing. OIF cannot keep others from using OSHO. Every trademark challenged by OSHO Friends was canceled or denied.

This is the best possible decision we could have hoped for. It steps over all the arguments about who owned what trademarks and whether anyone licensed anyone else. In essence, this decision simply says that there is no trademark. Since the name “OSHO” means a certain
approach to meditation and a whole movement, it can’t be a trademark for anyone, ever.

Many thanks to everyone who helped with this, who stood up and were counted. All the witnesses that OSHO Friends called were cited in the footnotes of the decision, but there were particular quotes from the testimony of Dhanyam (Rosansky), Krishna Priya (Hemenway), and Maniko (Dadigan). Telling the truth does have power!

I’m attaching the decision. Please pass this great news on to anyone on your address list who might like to celebrate.

Much love,
Sangeet

Question –

Osho, you were saying that the new will be victorious. Will it really be the new, or will it be the old polished up here and there. There are publications now in germany that use you. Some mention you in the list of literature as the source, but others use you and don’t mention you — or they even condemn you. I am really afraid of those people. What is their intention? Can you please take away that fear?
Osho : There is no need to be afraid of those people. That is happening in every language all over the world. People are taking my statements and not mentioning my name. There is no harm in it, because my name is not important; what is important is the statement. Even if these people are stealing, there is no harm. That statement may start something in somebody which these people cannot fulfill. That statement may trigger a process in somebody who will have to come to the original source.

They are not mentioning my name for two reasons. One reason is, they would like to appear original. Secondly, they are afraid that if they mention my name they will be condemned — then their book is not going to be praised, respected. But don’t be afraid of these people, whatever their reason. Anything taken from me is fire, and it does not matter in what way the fire reaches to somebody’s heart. These people who are doing such things cannot be great writers, poets, creative thinkers; otherwise they would not do such an act of stealing.

These people are third rate. So if they have stolen something from me it is going to stand out in their whole book as separate, unrelated, out of context. Anybody who has a little intelligence, will see that this part has not come from the same man who has written the book, because the book has a third class flavor; there is no originality, there is no understanding of the deeper problems of life, and there is no courage to say the truth as it is.

So anything that they have stolen to decorate their books, to make their books valuable, unknowingly that very part is going to destroy their whole book. They have stolen fire and put it into their book. In India, one radio station was reading my statements every day, for ten minutes in the morning, without mentioning my name — but passages from books, stories. Hundreds of letters came to me saying, “These people are stealing from your books.”

I said, “Don’t be worried. My name is not significant, my message is. They are cowards, or perhaps they love me but they are government servants.”

In India radio is owned by the government, television is owned by the government. If they use my name, they may lose their jobs. And certainly during that series, which was continuing for six months, even ministers, cabinet ministers and the prime minister, were quoting from those statements, thinking that they have nothing to do with me. But the people who were listening knew that those statements were not coming from Indira Gandhi — they could not be, they had no relevance with the person — they were stolen.

And they started searching for the place from where the statements had been stolen. Finally I met the person, the director of that radio station. He was a lover of me, and he said, “I have been condemned. Hundreds of letters are coming to me, saying, `You are stealing. You are not mentioning Osho’s name. But if I mention your name then the series will be stopped that very day. I will continue as long as they don’t discover…

`”And the moment it was discovered, immediately the series was stopped and the man was removed. He told me, “It happened because of that series. People started writing letters to the prime minister saying, `This man is stealing passages from Osho.’”

The prime minister herself had been stealing. Her lectures have been sent to me, and word for word, long passages have been stolen from me. But I have always taken the standpoint: let the truth reach to people by any means, by anyone.

I have been thinking that if the great powerful governments of the world are so afraid that they will not allow me entry into their country — just as a tourist for three or four weeks — if they are so impotent with all their power that they will not even allow me an overnight stay at the airport, which is legally my right…

In England my jet plane was standing at the airport, and the pilots had to rest. According to the law, after a certain period they cannot fly, so only in the morning would they be able to fly. I had every right to stay in the lounge at the airport, but they refused — as if with me there are different laws! One of my friends who was traveling with me just happened to see the file of the man who was preventing me, because he went to the bathroom, leaving the file on the table.

And my friend just looked and was surprised, because there were government instructions…. I had just arrived, but the file was ready, saying that if I try to stay even overnight I should not be allowed to stay in the first class lounge, but I should be put in jail; I am a dangerous person.

In the airport lounge, from where I cannot get into the country… there is no way to get into the country from the lounge. Every instruction was there about how they had to treat me. In England we had to stay for one night in jail, without any crime — just because the pilots could not fly overtime. And the government was ready beforehand. It was not a spontaneous decision, it was well-planned. Now there are countries who have decided in their parliaments that I should
not be allowed into their country.

And they have a certain European parliament… Just the other day I was informed that now they are considering in the European parliament — which is just a combined body of all the parliaments of Europe — a decision that I should not be allowed even to land my plane at any airport in Europe. Today they will be doing this in Europe — America has done it already.

Tomorrow they will be doing it in Asia, in Australia, in Africa. It is possible, very possible, that if they are so much afraid of me, they will start banning my books. And it may become necessary that my books go without my name, or with any name — like Holy Ghost!

The name does not matter. But the message has to reach. It is unprecedented. The whole world against a single man — a man who has no power, no nuclear weapons, who cannot do any harm to anybody. The whole world is at war with a single person. It simply shows that I am hitting at their very roots.

You need not be worried. If somebody has taken some passage, that passage will prove more important than his whole book. And I would like more and more writers, poets, film makers to steal as much as they can, because truth is not my property, I am not its owner. Let it reach in any way, in anybody’s name, in any form, but let it reach.”

Source – from Osho book “Beyond Psychology”

Question : Please explain the difference between Rationalisation and ‘Bullshit’.
Osho : ‘Bullshit’ is a far better word than ‘rationalisation’, but they mean the same. ‘Rationalisation’ is a clinical word — a word to be used by the professor, ‘bullshit’ is more alive. ‘Rationalisation’ is bloodless, ‘bullshit’ is very young, alive and kicking. But the meaning is the same, they are not different things.

The henpecked husband and his wordy wife were walking down the country road having one of their arguments in the usual way. She was winning. Suddenly she turned and saw a bull charging down the road. There was no time to warn her husband so she jumped into a hedge. The bull caught the man on its horns and sent him spinning fifty feet into the air. He came down in a ditch. When he finally managed to crawl out, he saw his wife standing on the road.
‘Maria’ he said ‘if you hit me like that again you’ll really make me lose my temper.’

Now this is bullshit. If you ask a psychoanalyst, he will call it a rationalisation. The culture society was organising a group to be comprised strictly of virgins, when a young lady carrying a baby appeared. ‘But, madam’ protested the president ‘that is evidence that you are not eligible for this society. Why do you think you will be able to join?’

‘I was only foolin’ around when this happened’ she explained. ‘So I thought I could get in as one of those foolish virgins.’

This is bullshit. ‘Rationalisation’ is a philosophical term. ‘Bullshit’ comes from the ordinary man, from the masses, people who live on the earth, with the earth, whose hands are muddy. The word ‘bullshit’ is also muddy as it is being used by people who are working, living the ordinary life. It does not come from the ivory towers of a university.

But remember, it is more authentic, it says much more than ‘rationalisation’. And always remember this, that words that are coined by professors are always anaemic. They are dead words — clinical, but do not say much; rather than saying, they hide. Let me say it in this way, the very word ‘rationalisation’ is a rationalisation: it is being used to avoid the word bullshit’.