Irony has wonderful timing. In my post about DB Breweries' trademarking of “saison” and “radler” I posed a question to the NZ Intellectual Property Office about how they would regard a foreign trademarking of a New Zealand cultural symbol. Today I read that an English soccer club is to perform a flippant haka before its season-opening game this week, despite legal protests that it insults Maori.
While I am very sympathetic to the sensitivities around the issue, I hope that those in NZ who oppose the use of the “bastardised” haka “because it disrespects their heritage” wholeheartedly join in SOBA’s call to boycott DB. Let’s face it, the Monteith’s Radler is the beer equivalent of the Spice Girls doing the haka.
Amazingly, in a country that permitted the trademarking of descriptive beer names, the Intellectual Property Office rejected the trademarking of the haka in 2006 by the Ngati Toa people, the people who had such a strong moral claim to ownership to it that it was recognised in a $300 million treaty.