Food for Naughty Thoughts

Editor's Note: This article may not be safe for work...or school...or places of worship...or...in polite company.

Prawns, pistachios and sea cucumbers do not look like they have much in common, but come every Chinese New Year, these foods will be consumed or gifted to others as they are homonymous with laughter and happiness. While these foods carry positive connotations, some foreign foods have the misfortune of sounding rather improper in English even though they have very normal meanings in their native settings. Polite people may be offended by what they’re about to read, so reader discretion is advised.

1. Cemen

Blue cheese, wasabi and anchovy dips may be turn-offs due to their strong and off-putting flavours/aromas but Cemen seems to top everything else. Adding the word ‘fresh’ to the packaging doesn’t seem to help improve matters either. But in actuality, Cemen is just a Turkish tomato paste dip with very normal ingredients, which would still be off-putting for folks who don’t like tomatoes.

2. Cream Collon

The idea of eating colons with cream would be hard to stomach for most people, but these cream-filled biscuit rolls from Japan do not contain any offal. ‘Koron’, Romanised as ‘Collon’, refers to a rolling motion, so Cream Collon = Cream Roll.

3. Megapussi

For the Finnish, this label on bags of potato crisps serves to indicate that the pussi, or bag, is mega-sized, but for the rest of us who are beyond any hope of rescue, this innocuous label would leave us sniggering like the juvenile-minded people we are.

It is a known fact that our world is made up of diverse languages and cultures, so every now and then, one would discover that a word with no special meaning in one language can have a very different and colourful meaning in another.

Of course, most people who start off their businesses would not go into analysis paralysis worrying whether their brand would carry negative connotations in a foreign market. It’s pretty much putting the cart before the horse to be thinking about whether one’s brand will be well received overseas when one has yet to succeed at home. When it’s time to go global, though, understanding the differences in language and culture can help brand owners avoid linguistic and cultural branding faux passes. Consider the following:

Coca-Cola – Folks who’ve been to the Middle Kingdom would tell of wunderbar English translations on signs like ‘Beware Door Pinch’ and ‘Slip and Fall Carefully’. What we have here is quite the opposite. A tale has it that Coca-Cola’s initial transliteration into Chinese was ‘Ke Dou Ken La’, meaning ‘bite a wax tadpole’, which understandably wasn’t the message the brand intended to convey. After some course-correcting, Coca-Cola’s Chinese brand has since been changed to ‘Ke Kou Ke Le’ which approximates to ‘tasty and happy’.

Church’s Chicken – While many of us Malaysians love our deep fried chicken, most of us are not willing to have our religious beliefs eroded just because we are unable to resist the earthly pleasures of a 3-piece chicken combo and honey butter biscuits. That’s why in Malaysia and some other parts of the world, Church’s Chicken is known as Texas Chicken so as to not offend religious sensitivities even though the franchise is named after its founder, Mr. George W. Church, Sr..

Being able to laugh at ourselves may be a good thing, but being a brand that’s a laughing stock can really hurt sales and marketability. Not to mention the headaches you'll face when trying to register the brand as a trademark in many countries whose trademark laws will not allow the registration of offensive/scandalous brands.

Get a local’s insight to understand how your brand may be perceived by customers in your target market and be flexible enough to make the necessary changes so that your brand can be a local hit in every locality in the world.

Recipes for Copyright Disaster

For many chefs, the internet is a great recipe book where any recipe is but a web search away. However, seekers of the world’s greatest recipes most often have to read through an entire epic poem of someone’s culinary odyssey before they get to the overly worded recipes and instructions that your grandma could have given you if you haven’t been such a spotted dick.

Seeing the torments of would-be chefs, Recipeasly is a website touted to help users get straight to the money-shot recipes without having to read through the Kama-Sutra text about how one had to seduce some aging ajumma to uncover the secrets behind her Michelin star-winning kimchi.

However, Recipeasly’s instant gratification didn’t sit well with many recipe writers. Because by ripping the recipes off the websites, Recipeasly has not only stolen the recipes which were, more often than not, the result of hours and hours hard work, but it also denied recipe writers the potential revenue that could have been generated from visitors visiting their websites. Due to all the bad press, Recipeasly was taken down with an apology put up in its place.

Recipes, regardless of whether they are written in books or webpages or if someone took the effort of prefacing them with a 1000 word story of their life, are considered literary works that are protectable under copyright. For, as long as it is original, a work in written or other material form will enjoy copyright protection. Unlike other forms of intellectual property, copyright protection comes into existence upon creation of the work and does not require any form of application at the IP office for it to be valid. So, if you created original content and published in your website, you have a right to stop others from misappropriating it.

On the other hand, if you are an app/web programmer implementing a data aggregation function for your app/website, e.g. creating a travel app that displays relevant information pertaining to a particular touristy location where the information is gathered from other websites, care must be taken to ensure that copyrightable works are not inadvertently copied and reproduced in the travel app.

This is because certain forms of information such as charts and tables, mundane as they may be, are also copyrightable works if they are original in nature. So if your app/website generates a graph that shows how busy a place is during a particular time of the day based on publicly available data which you have collated, that shouldn’t be an issue, but if that graph was copied off a website and displayed on yours without permission, that could land you into some trouble.

If you scrolled all the way to the bottom just to get to the point of the article, well, you’re in luck: inappropriately using someone else’s copyrighted material is a recipe for disaster. If you’re unsure whether you can print a picture of a carpet-chested Hoff off the internet for your bedroom wall, why not give us a holler? After all, we’re here to help.

40% Off on our Birthday!

This month we're turning 4! And to celebrate, we're taking 40% off our fees for all IP matters in Malaysia!!!

So what are you waiting for?! Let's protect your intellectual property today!

Terms and Conditions: This offer is available to Malaysian startups and SMEs only. It is not inclusive of the official fees payable to the IP office. And we reserve the rights to modify, suspend, or terminate the offer without prior notice. Offer ends 15 March 2021.