Pied à Terre to the World

New York City has filed an application to trademark the phrase “The World’s Second Home.” For real:

Lest there be any doubt, the Bloomberg administration wants to make official what generations of immigrants in New York have long known: the city is the world’s second home.

In application No. 78484751 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the city is seeking to trademark the phrase, “The World’s Second Home.” It wants exclusive rights to use it to promote business, tourism and economic development in the city, and hopes to slap it on everything from mouse pads and money clips to baby bibs and beanbag chairs.

If New York is successful, other cities that might fancy themselves the world’s second home could not legally apply that phrase to any of the 200-odd products and services enumerated in New York’s application. Among them are film and theatrical productions, parades, chair pads, sunglasses, temporary tattoos, postcards, beach sandals, and “electric light switch plates.”

“For all of those things, if the city got its trademark registration, nobody could come out with sunglasses and use the phrase, ‘The world’s second home,'” said William M. Borchard, an intellectual-property lawyer at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman in New York. “To do that, they would have to obtain a license from the city.”

The Times further explains how this would work in practice:

Of course, there are plenty of things not on the city’s list. Boston could conceivably license a line of canned beans under the label, “Bean Town – the world’s second home,” without running afoul of New York’s trademark. (“Bean Town” is actually the registered trademark of an Illinois company that sells dried beans.)

New York could eventually try to enforce an American trademark internationally to prevent, say, Paris from laying claim to the same title. In fact, it is New York’s contest with Paris and three other foreign cities to play host to the 2012 Summer Olympics that is driving its quest for this silver medal of geopolitical names. (Presumably, the gold would go to “the world’s home,” but no one has sought that title, according to a search of trademark records.)

The trademark application is one of several the city has filed since September as part of an ambitious plan to secure the rights to catchphrases, abbreviations and logos that it wants to license to makers of consumer products and clothing. Among them: a line drawing of the city’s official seal, which includes a sailor, an Indian and a beaver; the phrase “Made in NY”; and a Taxi and Limousine Commission badge, intended primarily for use on toy cars.

So if New York is the World’s Second Home, are, say, the Hamptons New York’s Second Home? And would that make the Hamptons the World’s Third Home? And as the Times notes, which city is audacious enough to call itself the World’s Home?