- The Guardian,
- Tuesday May 29 2001
In 1937 the first consignment of Hormel Spiced Ham rolled off the production line in the United States. After a competition for a more suitable name - in which the winner collected $100 - it was renamed SPAM, combining the SP from "Spiced" with the AM from "Ham". SPAM led a fairly blameless existence for the next 50 years, until internet users adopted the word to describe the insidious practice that developed during the 90s of sending unsolicited commercial emails to customers on the internet. The name was borrowed from the celebrated sketch in which the Monty Python team dressed up as Vikings and chanted a chorus of "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM ... increasingly loudly to drown out all other nearby conversations.
The adoption of the word spam to describe unsolicited emails was at one level an innocent bit of frivolity, but on another an outrageous abuse of intellectual property rights - namely the right of the said company Hormel to the results of its 1937 competition. Three years ago Hormel formally objected to the use of the word "spam" on a website: things were beginning to look a bit nasty. However, it is pleasing to report that, without the intervention of George Mitchell or anyone else, this problem has now been resolved.
The company has announced that it does not object any longer to the use of this "slang term" to describe unwanted mail ... as long as it is used in lower case to distinguish it from the trade mark SPAM which should be used with "all upper case letters". We are reminded that there is only one official SPAM website (where you can join the SPAM fan club for $15 a year and get an official SPAM T-shirt) and that all others have been created by someone else. Whether Hormel's more conciliatory approach leads to less spamming of the company's own SPAM site remains to be seen. Meanwhile, if this business does not bring Monty Python out of retirement, nothing will.
