“If you can’t even call your taco place a taqueria, where do you even start?” — Michelle Salazar de la Rocha, of Sonora
In response to a request for comment on the letter issued to Sonora, Ismael Munoz, Taqueria’s operations manager said that, “As with all UK trademark registrations, the provisions of the Trademarks Act grant the proprietor the exclusive right to the trade mark, and those rights are infringed when the trade mark is used in the UK by another undertaking without the proprietor’s consent.
“Through this long-standing use Worldwide Taqueria Ltd has developed significant goodwill and reputation in the trademark [...] it will take all steps necessary to maintain the distinctiveness of its trademarks and enforce its rights against infringement by other parties.” “For [Taqueria] it’s the name of a company, but for anybody else, it’s descriptive. It’s describing what your company does. And it’s not distinctive, because there can be many taquerias, just as there can be many pizzerias.” Taqueria filed its copyright in 2004, when, Napier says, “I imagine that were very few places in the U.K. using the word ‘taqueria’. But now there’s lots of them.”