PRESS RELEASE: Date 10-26-2005
From: Marc Perkel
Founder / First one - Church of Reality
CONTACT: marc@perkel.com
TITLE: The Church of Reality files for Trademark on the word "Reality"
The Church of Reality has filed for a trademark on the word "Reality". Trademark Application Number 78735626 in the International Class 045: Counseling in religious and spiritual matters was filed on October 18th 2005. The Church of Reality seeks to protect the intellectual property rights of the use of the trade mark "reality" to ensure that "Reality" is in the right hands. "Part of the reason behind the filing of this trademark", says Marc Perkel, Founder of the Church of Reality, "is to make sure that no one else files for it first. It is part of our mission as a religion to protect the integrity of reality. We wouldn't want the term reality to be under the control of religions who have nothing to do with reality."
"We also believe that very few, if any other religions will be affected by this trademark because even though members of other religions believe their religion is real, most all other religions have no reference to reality in their religious texts." Perkel states pointing out that the word Reality appears only once in the Bible and it's never used by God, Jesus, or any of the prophets. "Christians, for example", states Perkel, "would have no basis for a claim to oppose this trademark. Reality is simply not part of their published religious texts."
Even though Perkel jokes that if granted this trademark that every time a preacher says "reality" that they have to pay me a quarter, the Church of Reality is dedicated to spreading awareness of reality and encouraging people to make reality part of their daily lives. "In these days of complex trademark and intellectual property laws we feel that the Church of Reality should be the proper custodian of the rights to reality. Who is better suited to own reality than us? The Church of Reality is the rightful custodian of reality itself."
Perkel realizes that his trademark might not be granted but that even if his trademark is denied that the denial itself might protect reality for the people. "If we lose this the right way it might have the same effect as winning.", states Perkel. "The trademark office might decides that no one can own the right to reality, or they might decide that our previous trademark of "Church of Reality" also covers "Reality" by itself. So we could also win by losing this. We also feel that it will be good for people to debate the issue of whether or not terms like reality merit trademark protection. And we are also interested in seeing if any other religions oppose our trademark and attempt to state in legal documents what their relationship is to reality. All discussion of reality is a good thing."
The Church of Reality, who just this month received 501C3 tax exempt status, is a religion based on believing in everything that is real. Reality, as the name implies, is the central theme of the Church of Reality and represents or religious identity. Religions have different marketing themes that they use to compete for the religious mind space as they compete for membership. Except for the King James Bible, most all other Bibles are copyrighted works which generate income for their copyright holders. So people in the religion business do use intellectual property rights to protect their funding sources. We as the Church of Reality believe that our religious identity might be harmed in the future should a competing religion abuse our identity by confusing people leading them to believe that they are us and raising money in our name. Therefore we feel it is our responsibility to address this.
Marc Perkel
First One
Church of Reality