Trademark battle 'without end'...

The extraordinary saga of litigant Mike Stainbank, who has described the South African judiciary as ‘a cesspool of malfeasance’, and who has battled it out for 13 years with the proprietors of the South African Apartheid Museum at Freedom Park over the valuable trademark, is recorded in detail in an article in the Mail & Guardian. Stainbank’s battle isn’t over ... he says he is awaiting a Constitutional Court ruling on the matter. The entrepreneur and brand architect faces three months in prison, having lost an appeal to overturn a contempt of court ruling. The court order he disobeyed and the subsequent lost appeal stem from one of his many cases against an entity registered as the South African Apartheid Museum at Freedom Park. The order prohibits him from publishing and disseminating statements that, among other things, characterise the present and past directors of the entity as ‘criminals, racists or liars’ who have stolen or misappropriated his intellectual property. The Apartheid Museum, owned then by brothers Solly and Abe Krok’s Gold Reef Resorts, opened its doors in 2001. Stainbank always challenged the legitimacy of the museum’s name, arguing his own trademark was unfairly expunged, and that the concept was plagiarised from ideas he had documented in a 1998 prospectus. Stainbank says he first registered the trademark ‘The Apartheid Museum’ in 1990. Don MacRobert, a registered patent agent who has represented the South African Apartheid Museum in Freedom Park since the trademark was expunged in 2002, reportedly told the paper Stainbank had been ‘rejected by the highest courts ... and has been declared a vexatious litigant’. MacRobert believes Stainbank has been very carefully constructing an image of a man wounded by the justice system, notes the M&G article.