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Flour City Dispute Captures Community Attention

Keith Myers posted a copy of the cease and desist letter in the window over the weekend.
Veronica Volk
/
WXXI
Keith Myers posted a copy of the cease and desist letter in the window over the weekend.

Keith Myers says this is probably the last media interview he's going to do.

"The sooner its over the better. I just want to get up in the middle of the night and make bread."

Keith is a local Rochester business owner. He owns Flour City Bread, and until this past weekend, that was not a controversial statement.

This all started about four months ago when Myers got a letter in the mail from an attorney. It was a cease and desist letter, and it was worded pretty strongly. It turns out his name, "Flour City Bread," is in violation of a trademark registered by another local business, Flour City Pasta.

Myers knows the Flower City Pasta people. He says, they've actually been working side-by-side for years, working at farmers markets across the region.

"We've had a really amicable relationship up to this point."

So Myers called up an intellectual property attorney.

"And the intellectual property attorney says, this shouldn't have happened. I don't know how they got this by."

His lawyers tell him he can apply to have the trademark canceled, but it's a pretty expensive. So, as so many often do, Myers takes to the internet. He sets up an Indiegogo campaign called "Flour City For All," and he says he's actually really surprised by the attention this story got.

"I am floored at the support that we've got from our customers and fans. It's really humbling."

But what started as support for Flour City Bread, became internet outrage and backlash against Flour City Pasta. Facebook comments called for businesses to boycott their product, and the language online got mean. Myers says he never intended that kind of response..

"I don't like that, I mean I really -- it's not necessary to be negative and boycott people's businesses."

Paul Nunes is the attorney for Flour City Pasta. He gets some of the backlash.

"We're a small big town and we're intensely proud of being Rochesterians and all things Rochester."

But he says this dispute, it's not even about Flour City Bread, specifically.

"There's actually a business from Florida trying to register Flour City Bakery, having nothing to do with Rochester."

The way trademarks work is, you either enforce them or you lose them, and then companies like the one in Florida might put out a product that damages the name, and affects every ones business and reputation.

Besides, Nunes says Flour City Pasta isn't the first company to trademark something like this.

"All we have to look to is our Genesee Beer, and, of course, its name, its trademark is simply the word Genesee."

Here's the thing about trademark law that I think gets to the heart of this issue. One the one hand, you have people like Keith Myers saying, trademarking is a kind of ownership, a claim over something, that, in this case, he thinks should belong to everyone.

On the other hand you have lawyers like Nunes saying, take business interests out of it. It's a consumer protection law. For example, if you went to a store, maybe out of state, and saw Flour City Bread on the shelf, and next to it you saw Flour City Pasta, would you know they were from different companies?

How about Flour City Donuts? Or Flour City Cupcakes?

"What extraordinary men these are and how rich our community is to have such great products. So I'm hoping that at the end of the day there is some positive reconciliation on a personal level between these two. These are business issues that can be worked out between lawyers."

Since this story first started getting attention, Flour City Pasta has dropped the cease and desist. A post on the company's Facebook page says they support the use of Flour City Bread's name in New York, across the country, anywhere.

A recent post on Flour City Bread's Facebook reads: "Flour City Bread is pleased to announce that we have agreed to settle this dispute over the name Flour City."

But the Indiegogo campaign is still up, and the Flour City For All movement is still collecting money.

Veronica Volk is a senior editor and producer for WXXI News.