"Oh, Trapattoni! Used to be Italian but he's Irish now!" Imagine walking into a patent office looking to trademark that chant. You'd want some neck. Well apparently trademarking chants is more commonplace in Iceland, as one Icelandic cartoonist found out.
One of the most enduring images of Euro 2016 in France were the Icelandic fans and their thunderous, primal chant of "HÚH".
Hugleikur Dagsson had been selling t-shirts with the popular chant on them only to find out that another party had apparently trademarked the word 'HÚH'.
The cartoonist responded to the news in a Facebook post,
First of all, we didn’t know that it was possible to own this sound effect. “Second, I thought we had stolen the Viking clap from Scotland, just like a regular Viking. Third, the T-shirt doesn’t say HÚH! but actually HÚ! Which to my mind is more of an Icelandic spelling than HÚH!”
I don’t understand the problem. My HÚ! doesn’t need to bother his HÚH! We can all HÚ! together. Isn’t that what HÚ(H) is all about?”
Dagsson said that he will continue to sell the t-shirt despite pressure from the trademark holder, and told the Reykjavik Grapevine that he will give half of the profits from sales of the t-shirt to the Icelandic Cancer Society.
Well, the ball is his court. He told us that we would either have to stop printing these shirts or pay him a part of the profit. So we decided to tell Facebook about this and see what happens.
If you want to stand with Dagsson against this frankly depressing state of affairs, you can buy his t-shirt here.
