Apparently for five years now, the USCCB has been in various forms of litigation against the Media Research Center.

Huh.

At issue? Three letters: C.N.S.

From their battlements at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops they have been wagging a pettifoggers’ war with MRC over a nonsense at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to both and for nothing. MRC has a news service on the Internet, Cybercast News Service. It uses the name CNSNEWS.com and has been since 1998. Two years after it started, the bishops through their lawyers ordered MRC to cease and desist from using CNS in its name because the bishops’ Catholic News Service had earlier used the letters.

MRC refused, noting that several other news organizations used the same letters, for instance, a Protestant group, Charisma News Service, the Cox News Service, the China News Service. Pick on them was Bozell’s implicit challenge. Also Bozell discovered that the Catholic News Service never had the letters trademarked and believes they probably could not because of all the other organizations using these three letters. MRC proceeded to acquire its own trademark, "Cybercast News Service-CNSNews.com," along with a distinctive logo to distinguish itself from all the others. That did it. The bishops’ lawyers commenced a legal battle that has run up until this very month. So far, Bozell has beaten them twice. They tried to get revoked the CNSNEWS.com trademark. That case was subsequently dismissed. The bishops then sued in federal court. That suit has also been thrown out. What next?

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