Culture Magazine

THE HOT LIS T 202 3 culturecheesemag.com 43 The music industry likes to fight about intellectual property. Artists need permission to cover or sample a song and pay fees and royalties when they do. This borrowing can boost the popularity of the original song—as happened with Weezer's take on Toto's "Africa" in 2018— but not always. Rick Astley, whose 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the stuff of meme legend, recently sued a rapper for covering his song so perfectly that it was indistinguishable from the original. Instead of an homage, Astley saw it as a theft. W hat does all this have to do with cheese? In music, it matters who did it first. A musician's value lies in their authorship. Cheese is a different story—the wheels we know and love have been collaboratively honed by hundreds if not thousands of people over the centuries. But, oftentimes, that honing was done in just one area, whose cheesemakers may not see it as such a group effort. American cheesemakers like to riff on other countries' offerings, making everything from chèvre and queso fresco to brie, manchego, and gruyère—of course gruyère. You don't need to follow cheese news to have heard the grumblings about gruyère. Even the mainstream media covered Interprofession du Gruyère v. US Dairy Export Council, a case that lasted over a year, underwent multiple appeals, and tackled questions such as: Can a country be an author? And if so, how long is their product "theirs"? A seemingly final verdict was reached this March, but the fight feels far from over. YEAR IN REVIEW For many, the situation began in 2021, when the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) denied trademark protection for Gruyère. But for its Swiss makers, it started a little earlier than that—in the twelfth century, in a town called Gruyères, where the legendary wheels were first made. In the present day, these Swiss makers joined forces with French producers of Gruyère to file a joint appeal of the decision to the US Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, who also denied them, citing, among other things, the World Championship Cheese Contest's celebration of gruyère from all over the world. This partnership of Swiss and French was an unusual one. The two countries have not always been friends in Gruyère— both carry a country-specific Appellation d'Origine Controlée (AOC) for the cheese they produce, but Switzerland took issue with France applying for the European Union's Appellation d'Origine Protégée (AOP). The Swiss felt if anyone should be getting a Europe-wide AOP designation, it should be them, and the EU agreed. But this all seems to be water under the bridge now. "The application … was jointly filed," says Denis Kaser, a representative of the Interprofession du Gruyère, "because the Gruyères region straddles the border of Switzerland and France." In January 2022, US District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III ruled against the Swiss/French team, stating that gruyère need not come from Gruyères, Switzerland, because Americans don't associate the word with that region. "Decades of importation, production, and sale of cheese labeled gruyère produced outside the Gruyère [sic] region of Switzerland and France have eroded the meaning of that term and rendered it generic," he stated in his opinion. (US law does not allow for the trademarking of generic terms.) France and Switzerland filed another joint appeal in December. "Whether Gruyère is a generic term depends on how it is understood by a majority of consumers," their PHOTO: ©Le Gruyère AOP

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