Skip to main content
Some links on this page are Amazon affiliate links. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

The "Mormon" Trademark is About to Expire

Image
By Mason

 The request for Mormon Stories to rebrand has spread quickly through Mormon spaces. Followers learned that om November 14th 2025, the LDS Church had reached out with claims that the podcast was infringing on the “Mormon” trademark. The demand leaned on the legal idea that the Church owns the word. 

The request was shared on social media by @mormstories, but those posts seem to have been removed. Fortunately, copies of the email were shared on reddit.



But there is a significant detail sitting behind this entire dispute. The Church will have to renew the "Mormon" trademark in the 2026 to 2027 window. 




When that time comes, they must prove that they still use the word “Mormon” in active commerce. USPTO rules are clear on this point. A trademark only survives if the owner can show that it is still printed on actual goods or services that are still being sold or distributed. The official guidelines spell it out at uspto.gov under “Keeping your registration alive.”


Here is the tension. For years the Church has tried to distance itself from the word. Leaders asked members to stop using Mormon as a label. The Church rebranded its websites. It retired the phrase Mormon Messages. It scrubbed the word from manuals. The public campaign insisted that Mormon was inaccurate, misleading, and spiritually harmful. 


In daily speech, materials, and media, the Church’s official line is that it does not want to be known as Mormon. But in the legal arena, the institution now argues that use of the word by others violates its trademark rights.


The problem is that trademark law rewards consistent use. The USPTO requires renewal evidence in specific windows. Owners must file a Section 8 declaration between years 9 and 10 and again every 10 years after that. That filing must include a specimen, which is a real example of the mark as it appears on goods or services today. If they cannot show use at all, the registration is cancelled. 



Source: USPTO “Keeping your registration alive.”


Update (12/09/25)

Wouldn't publishing The Book of  Mormon fulfill this requirement of continued use?

The USPTO allows the public to access the specimens that have been submitted over the years to prove use of the trademark. Those can be found here under "documents". In none of the filings has the church used The Book of Mormon. Here is what they have used instead:


The Mormon Messages For Youth page on LDS.org (No longer in use)


The Mormon Messages For Youth YouTube Channel (No longer in use)


Mormon Genealogy on family search (seems to have ben renamed ("Latter-day Saint Online Genealogy Records")



Signs at many church buildings and historic sites used to display "The Mormons" in parenthesis. But this practice is now strictly against the church style guide


Category:

Comments

  1. AnonymousDecember 8, 2025 at 3:06 PM


    So this wasnt an issue for the last ~20 years that Mormon Stories has been around? Astonishing timing

    ReplyDelete
  2. MORMON COURTDecember 8, 2025 at 11:05 PM

    They still print Mormon on the book of mormon and distribute it

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MasonDecember 9, 2025 at 4:10 PM

      I updated the end of the article to address this.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mormon Blood and the Esther Cohen-Tizer-Epstein Letter

By Mason
With the recent release of nearly 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files, there have been several connections made regarding Jeffery Epstein paying tuition for several students at BYU. The most notable of which is presented in what is known as the Esther Cohen-Tizer-Epstien Letter.    Some are questioning the authenticity of the letter, but some clues seem to point us to a woman named   Esther Cohen .  Lets look at a few connections. Note that these connections are not an attempt at making any accusations and are simply connections made through publicly available information. I will be updating this page as I find more information. EFTA00129111  Reference to the Seven Bowls School of Nutrition From Esther's website: alchemyofnourishment.com (Update March 04, 2026: The site seems to have been taken down) She began studying nutrition as a teenager: Which also seems to align with her site. Alchemy of Nourishment Along with the claim of residing in Colorado Alc...
2 comments
Read

Early Mormon Criticisms - 3: Delusions

By Mason
 This series looks back at how early critics of the church reacted to the rise of Mormonism. Some mocked it, others warned against it, and a few tried to make sense of it. Each post features a historical excerpt and some brief context to show how critics viewed the new faith as it was unfolding.  -The full series can be found here - In 1831 Alexander Campbell published An Analysis of the Book of Mormon , one of the earliest full-length critiques of Joseph Smith’s new scripture. The piece first appeared as a review in Campbell’s periodical The Millennial Harbinger and was republished the following year, in 1832, as a standalone pamphlet for wider circulation. Campbell was a prominent religious leader and editor, and he approached the Book of Mormon as a text that needed to be tested, line by line, against the Bible it claimed to supplement. Unlike satirical responses such as Abner Cole’s Book of Pukei , Campbell did not parody Mormonism. He treated it as a serious theologica...
1 comment
Read

The Peacemaker Summit and an Attempt to Silence Mormonism's Critics

By Mason
 An upcoming event called the Peacemaker Summit , organized by The Holy Rebellion , is being promoted as a gathering for faithful LDS creators. The organizing vision for this event is explicitly about displacing critics of the faith by flooding social media platforms with coordinated, high-volume pro-Mormon content. That goal deserves scrutiny. My initial reaction to the original video The Stated Aim: Outnumber the Critics Travis Lish and Christian Williams from The Holy Rebellion have been clear about their motivation. They believe critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dominate online spaces and that faithful voices need to overwhelm that presence. The solution being proposed is to create enough volume to hide criticisms from search results.  ... our goal is 1 billion views per month  collectively  as Latter Day Saint creators. Imagine a world where when you search Mormon or LDS or Joseph Smith  across any platform, what you would see...
1 comment
Read

Where Did Joseph Smith Dig for Treasure?

By Mason
Before Joseph Smith was known as a prophet, he was known locally for treasure digging. An article written by Dan Vogel   mapped out the physical locations connected to that earlier phase of Smith’s life. Drawing from court records, affidavits, neighbor testimony, and later reminiscences, Vogel was able to place Smith on specific hillsides, farms, and riverbanks across western New York and northern Pennsylvania. Show Dan Vogel's Full Article (If you have issues on mobile, you can read the full document  here ) The article itself is a valuable asset to anybody who wants to understand the treasure digging activities of Joseph Smith. However, due to the design of the maps provided it may be difficult to immediate tell where the digs took place. Which in my opinion, may limit the sharing of his research. As such, I took it upon myself to update the map in Google Earth using Dan Vogel's research as my guide. This gives us a bit of clearer idea of w...
Post a Comment
Read

The Temple Emphasis and Decline of Tithing

By Mason
A review of General Conference discourse in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reveals an interesting shift. Temples have always been mentioned more often than tithing, but the gap has widened dramatically in recent decades. References to tithing appear to be steadily declining, while references to temples have skyrocketed. The question is why. Data was pulled in 2024 from www.lds-general-conference.org  The 2020 dataset sees a large decline in both Tithing and Temple references due to only being halfway through the decade In the nineteenth century, church leaders spoke openly about tithing because the church needed money. The institution faced repeated financial strain. The Panic of 1893 damaged the Utah economy, and federal legislation such as the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887 resulted in the confiscation of church property. Under those conditions, leaders frequently urged members to contribute financially. That urgency faded once the church stabilized its finances. In...
Post a Comment
Read

Encouraging Marriage: Lowering the Age for Female Missionaries

By Mason
 In October 2012, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially lowered the minimum age for missionary service. Before that change, men could begin at age 19 and women at age 21. The update allowed men to start at 18 and women at 19, a major shift in how young Latter-day Saints approached their early adult years. That change dramatically increased missionary numbers, with applications skyrocketing in the weeks after the announcement and women making up a much larger share of those who served.   For more than a decade after that update, the rule stayed the same. Women could serve at 19 and men at 18, with women serving 18-month missions and men serving two years. In November 2025 the Church again changed the rule: the minimum age for women to serve was lowered to 18, equalizing it with men.  What made this new policy notable wasn’t just equality in age; it was the statements that came with it.   In a January 2026 interview with the Church’s own Deseret News, Presid...
Post a Comment
Read

A Summary of Lehite History

By
According to the Book of Mormon, a family of Israelites claims to be inspired to flee the city of Jerusalem and embark on a transoceanic voyage to somewhere on the American continent, which their chief patriarch, Lehi, asserts is a "promised land" for them and their posterity. What follows is my reconstruction of Lehite history by using the chronology described in the Book of Mormon text, which is replete with mentions of the years that have passed "since Lehi left Jerusalem," as well as its dating method when its government shifted to a judicial republic, known as "the reign of the judges." I will be treating this as a history as written . That means that I will attempt to fill in gaps of relevant information with the most logical timeline, especially the ages of the various patriarchs featured in the narrative.  Some events, when summarized, will sound more absurd or strange than they do in the more flowery prose presented in the text. I have attempted t...
Post a Comment
Read

What the Maine Temple Announcement Signals

By Mason
 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced on December 14, 2025 that a temple will be built in Portland, Maine . The announcement came during a regional Christmas devotional and was delivered by Elder Allen D. Haynie, a member of the Church’s Area Presidency, rather than during a General Conference session or directly by the Church president. What makes this announcement stand out is not the location, but the method. For years, temples were almost always announced during the April or October General Conference, usually by the Church president, at the close of a major session watched by a global audience. Under Russell M. Nelson, this practice became especially prominent, with long lists of new temples read out twice a year. These announcements have often been used rhetorically to imply numerical growth, even in regions with small or stagnant membership.  Announcing a temple outside of General Conference reduces the performative aspect of that claim.   T...
Post a Comment
Read

The Peacemaker Summit, Part 2: Keynotes to the Kingdom

By
Click here  for part 1! Following some initial audio/visual difficulties (which drove my professional A/V friend crazy), the Peacemaker Summit finally got underway with some introductory remarks by Marla Gale, the event sponsor, then by Travish Lish and Christian Williams, the co-owners of The Holy Rebellion social media accounts. What followed over the next several hours were eight keynote addresses and a lunch break. Alternatively, skip to the end to see my final thoughts. In summarizing and evaluating each speaker , I'm employing the rubric below (I am a teacher, after all): Does the speaker... have a consistent thesis related to the stated mission of the conference? clearly articulate an application of content creation online? rigorously demonstrate an actionable metric for peacemaking? utilize a high-quality and engaging presentational format? Christian Williams: "The Accusatory Fog & Two Ineffective Responses" @theholyrebellion Christian begins his address the ...
Post a Comment
Read
e
Link copied!