Polish delivery giant sparks grammar debate in trademark battle

Poland’s biggest private delivery firm, InPost, has sparked controversy and amusement after requesting that its contractors not use grammatical case endings, as is normal in the Polish language, for the name for its parcel lockers as it attempts to protect the trademark.

The word in question is paczkomat, a neologism created from a portmanteau of the words paczka (meaning package) and automat (meaning an automatic machine).

While InPost, which pioneered the use of parcel lockers in Poland, has trademarked the term, others argue that paczkomat has been absorbed into everyday language and is used by Poles to describe any parcel locker.

Like almost all words in Polish, the term paczkomat takes on different endings depending on which grammatical case is used. For example, do paczkomatu and w paczkomacie mean “to the parcel locker” and “in the parcel locker” respectively, being declined in their genitive and locative forms.

However, last week, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, a leading newspaper, published the content of an email InPost had sent to its contractors in which it asked them not to use such forms in official communication.

“Use the correct form and do not decline the trademark Paczkomat®,” it wrote. “If necessary, precede the trademark Paczkomat® with the words ‘device/machine’ and decline this word only (e.g. List of available Paczkomat® devices)”.

The latter word for “devices”, urządzenia, was declined in the email in its genitive form, urządzeń, while the word Paczkomat remained unchanged.

As the first company in Poland to offer parcel locker services, InPost applied to the Polish Patent Office in 2009 to trademark the Paczkomat name for its devices.

The following year the office approved the request, meaning that InPost’s competitors that also use parcel lockers – including Poland’s largest online marketplace Allegro and the country’s state energy giant Orlen – cannot call their machines by the same name.

This decision was, however, opposed by the Polish state post office, Poczta Polska, which moved to introduce its own network of parcel devices and in 2015 filed an application to invalidate the protection right for the Paczkomat trademark.

The Polish Patent Office initially dismissed Poczta Polska’s case. The authority considered that the neologism Paczkomat does not directly describe the characteristics of the goods and services for which the disputed trademark is intended.

However, the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw disagreed with this argumentation. In a 2017 judgment, it pointed out that no protective rights are granted for terms that do not have sufficient distinctive features.

In the court’s view, the patent office did not pay attention to a trend in the Polish language whereby there are many words describing devices whose name is based on the function of the device and the ending “-mat”, such as bankomat (ATM), parkomat (parking meter) and kawomat (coffee vending machine).

InPost filed an appeal against that ruling, which was eventually dismissed by the Supreme Administrative Court – Poland’s highest authority on such issues – last year. The case has now returned to the patent office for a further decision.

Beyond the legal debate, however, linguists note that expecting Poles not to grammatically decline paczkomat is a losing battle. Indeed, many have noted that even in its own emails to customers, InPost uses case endings for the word.

“The word paczkomat is a Polish word, formed according to the rules of word-formation, and is therefore subject to variation,” Krystyna Data, a lexicographer, told online news service Gazeta.pl.

If InPost wanted to create a name whose endings do not change, it should have used a foreign one, she adds. Certain foreign words do not take case endings in Polish.

Another professor of linguistics, Ewa Kołodziejek, likewise told newspaper Kurier Szczeciński that InPost’s demand is “bizarre”.

“Even if paczkomat is a proper noun, it has certainly already undergone a process of appelativisation: this is what linguists call situations in which a proper noun has lost its individual characteristics and has become a common word referring to a whole group of products of a given type,” said Kołodziejczak.

As another example, she noted that the term adidas, which originally referred only to shoes made by the German sportswear giant, is now used in Polish as a generic term to refer to sports shoes.

A similar process has taken place with many words in English that have gone from being trademarked product names to widely used terms describing a type of product, such as hoover, thermos, tupperware and jet ski.

Main image credit: Kgbo/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.