Patent? What Patent?

The R.E.A.L. Party never filed for a patent. There is no patent pending. We did, however, file for a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Why?

Here's how it all went down:

On Wednesday, February 17th, two days before the election filing deadline, Jose Aliaga and his associates filed as a ticket under the name of The R.E.A.L. Party. This was to carry on the idea of the R.E.A.L. Party itself, that of Respect, Equality, Action, Leadership and having a continuous identity on campus. It does not, never did, and never would, have anything to do with any previous candidates or members of the current student government. It's a campaign identity. It lives during a campaign and goes away unless/until someone uses it in the next election. It does not and never did belong to any one person, so no one person can claim to "be" the party or to "give" its use to anyone else. That's just not how it works.

We filed. It's ours.

Within hours of filing, the current SG Vice President was rather irate over it and made a verbal threat regarding its use. How did he know it was filed? We can't be sure, but we suspect it has something to do with the current SG President illegally accessing election filing records, the same way he knew who had signed out packets to potentially run, the same way candidates were recruited for his VP's ticket.

Friday, February 19th, the deadline day, we filed an updated roster for our ticket. Filing early and updating by the deadline are perfectly allowed. This was mentioned to and allowed by not one, but three, members of the Election Commission.

By the end of February, The R.E.A.L. Party had designs approved for campaign materials and put them into production to start using them in March. These included use of the R.E.A.L. Party name and logo.

The VP's ticket, already in possession of the previously existing R.E.A.L. Party facebook group, changed its name to UNITY and simply substituted "UNITY" for "REAL", including on the logo. However, they kept the logo itself, the "RP."

On Friday, March 5th, the R.E.A.L. Party filed a complaint against their use of the logo and facebook identity.

Over that weekend, the SG President, VP and Director of Web Development each filed complaints against The R.E.A.L. Party alleging misuse of our own identity and logo. The R.E.A.L. Party was made aware of these late Sunday night, March 7th, and had until 4p.m. Monday to submit any responses. That's when the Election Commission was meeting to decide all four complaints, 1 by and 3 against The R.E.A.L. Party.

The decisions on the complaints were sent to the filers as of 5p.m., Tuesday, March 9th. Due to confusion as to which emails were sent the decisions, The R.E.A.L. Party were last to know the results. The SG President, however, knew, and took the opportunity, at the end of that day's SG meeting, to publicly call out the R.E.A.L. Party members in attendance and threaten them with Judicial action.

The Election Commission dismissed complaints by the VP and Web Director, but upheld points by the President and R.E.A.L. Party. The result was UNITY had to completely take down their ill-gotten facebook group and R.E.A.L. Party could continue to use the name, but not the logo or anything else. The 7-member Commission ruled 5-0 on the matter of the facebook group. The President's logo/name matter was decided 3-0-1. That's 3 in favor and 1 abstaining, 3 absent.

Unsatisfied with the results, the SG President, as he'd done in his filed complaint, threatened Judicial action if The R.E.A.L. Party continued to use the name, even after the Election Commission upheld it was ours via the filing in February. He contends that he alone is identified campus-wide as the R.E.A.L. Party, that he knows the minds of all the students and that using the name, logo or anything else associated with them was an implied endorsement by him for us.

Wishing to regain our identity and put all this behind us, The R.E.A.L. Party called an emergency meeting to discuss how to handle the situation. We considered a multitude of options; pros, cons, potential outcomes, etc. Rather than engage in a never-ending battle of opinions within the university, we took action to secure use of the name and logo by filing an application for a trademark on Wednesday, March 10th and notified both the Election Commission and Judicial Board the next day.

To be clear, the cost of this filing was less than it would have cost to replace all R.E.A.L. Party campaign materials bearing the name and logo. Filing for a trademark saved money, kept our campaign materials in use and moved the argument out of the university, thus putting an end to this, we hope.

Do not be misled.

We do not claim or seek endorsement from the current Student Government or its members. We want to move forward and do more, do better, than they have done.