After a great day of golf yesterday – I came back to check my email messages and I find “Infringement of Hasbro, Inc.’s MONOPOLY® Logo.”

Immediately, I laughed and said to myself “yeah right.” First – why in the world would they care about my logo, and second – HOW in the world did they find MY blog??

Now, anyone who knows even the slightest about me knows that my absolute favorite board game of all time is… MONOPOLY!!! So, when I wanted to officially start blogging (somewhere other than MySpace), I decided to create an ‘online brand’ for myself. There are several things that could be used to describe me - Monopoly, entrepreneur, Captain Morgan, Marine, Republican, etc.

I took all of those things into consideration and decided that since my life as an entrepreneur always seems to have me in a world of chaos – I needed to include that word. Okay… so we have part of the brand – what else? I really do love Monopoly so, I wanted to find a way to incorporate that as well. As I thought to myself about what a ‘monopoly’ was I mixed that idea with my conservative Republican nature, and decided that since our (Republican) beliefs are the only ones that should matter – we want to ‘monopolize’ the country. Thus – Monopolized. Put the two together, and you get Monopolized Chaos!

PERFECT! Jim Brown IS – Monopolized Chaos.

So, what’s next? I need a logo – right? Of course I do – I have to also rely on my design background! What would represent my new brand and persona better than the Monopoly logo? After doing a little digging, I figure out what font they used to create the logo, changed the name to Monopolized, and the color to orange (my favorite color – again, has to represent me), added Chaos, and viola!!! We have a logo!

Fast forward nearly six months later and I get the letter below from Hasbro demanding that I immediately cease the use of my ‘infringing’ logo. Are you serious? Again, I ask the question, HOW in the world did they find my blog? But it gets better – read the letter…

Hasbro states that the use of my logo will cause “confusion with respect to Hasbro’s authorization or sponsorship of or association with your activities,” and further the use of the logo will, “dilute the distinctive quality of the MONOPOLY® logo.”

Still laughing.

I guess I should feel honored that Hasbro thinks that my little blog on my portion of the internets (Insert George Bush parody here), will impact so many people that it will cause confusion of their brand.

Wow.